Imitating Watercolor and Oil Paint
</objective> <objective>Imitating Pencil, Charcoal, and Chalk
</objective> <objective></objective> <objective></objective> </feature>As you learned in the last hour, Photoshop can do more than fix photos; it can also help you create images straight from your imagination. In this hour, we look at ways to make an image in Photoshop look as though it was drawn or painted with real-world ink, charcoal, or paint. If you’re already a skilled artist with conventional tools and materials, you’ll be intrigued by Photoshop’s capability to mimic some of those techniques, without all the mess—and with the capability to go back and undo your mistakes. If you’re one of those who, like me, has never been able to get the hang of drawing or painting on paper or canvas, you’ll love the ability Photoshop gives you to “fake it.”
The techniques that we cover in this hour enable you to imitate traditional artists’ media, such as chalk, charcoal, paint, and ink on paper. You’ll create these effects with a combination of painting and using filters. But you can also create images that transcend the limitations of real-world media, combining effects and creating new ones. As with so much in Photoshop, experimentation is the key to mastery; your only limitation is your own creativity.
One of Photoshop’s remarkable tricks is simulating the appearance of real-world art media. You can achieve these effects by using a filter; we jump ahead a little in this hour and introduce you to some of Photoshop’s “artistic” filters. You can also achieve these affects through judicious use of the Smudge and Blur tools, or by choosing or creating custom brushes and carefully applying color with a particular blending mode. You can create a picture starting with a blank canvas, or you can work with a photograph to make it look like a watercolor painting, an oil painting in any of a half-dozen styles, or even a plaster bas-relief or fresco. Whatever method you choose, you’ll find that you can achieve amazing results.
Note: Okay, It’s Not Perfect
Let’s back up for a minute and admit something: Photoshop wasn’t actually designed to be an all-purpose graphics program. It lacks some of the precise drawing tools that you’ll find in Adobe Illustrator or the natural-media painting tools featured in Corel Painter (to name just two of the best programs). However, Photoshop has such a wide range of features that you can use it very effectively to create many kinds of graphics. Because of its plug-in filters, which you’ll learn about in a few hours, it can do some remarkable things with graphics, most of which lie far beyond the capability of an ordinary painting or drawing program. Should Photoshop be your only graphics program? Probably not, if you need to do a lot of drawing. But for digital darkroom work and retouching, nothing can top it—and its drawing and painting abilities are certainly nothing to sneeze at.
Artists who work in conventional media have a great deal of respect for watercolor painters because watercolor is considered to be one of the most difficult media to handle. Watercolorists must use a brush that’s “wet” enough to blend colors smoothly but “dry” enough to prevent the image from turning to mud. Working with digital “watercolors” is much, much easier. We start with a filter technique that’s intended to make a photo into a simulated watercolor painting.
Photoshop’s Watercolor filter is one way to convert a picture to a watercolor painting. To apply the filter, choose Filter, Artistic, Watercolor submenu, as shown in Figure 9.1.
The Watercolor filter works best on pictures that contain large, bold shapes without too much detail. Because this filter tends to darken backgrounds and shadows quite a bit, you’ll get the best results if you start with a picture that has a light background. (You can also use the techniques you learned in Hour 5, “Adjusting Brightness and Color,” to turn a darker background into a lighter one.) The photo in the figures that follow features a perfect pink peony. When you choose the Watercolor filter (or virtually any other Photoshop filter, for that matter), you’ll see a dialog like the one shown in Figure 9.2. This Filter Gallery contains a thumbnail view of your picture, a catalog of filters to choose from, and a different set of sliders for each filter that enable you to control the way in which the picture is converted. If you click and drag on the preview image, you can slide it around to see the effect of your settings on different parts of the photo, and you can enlarge and reduce it as well. Most Photoshop filters, even those that don’t appear in the Filter Gallery, have dialogs and settings very much like this one. After you have used one, the rest will seem relatively familiar.
Note: Filters for Photoshop
Filters, in Photoshop terminology, are commands built into the program (or “plugged in” as added features) that apply specific effects to your images. For instance, one of Photoshop’s filters converts your image to a pattern of dots, like a blown-up newspaper photograph. Another can turn it into a colored pencil drawing. Dozens of filters come with Photoshop, and others are sold by third-party vendors or distributed as shareware or freeware. In Hours 14–17, you’ll learn more about what kinds of filters you can get and where to find them.
Filters can take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or more to apply, even in the preview area. If you don’t immediately see the effects of the filter on the preview, look for a progress bar in the status bar at the bottom of the filter window. It fills as the computer calculates and applies the Filter effect. When the bar disappears, the effect is in place.
The Watercolor filter has three sliders that control different aspects of the way it’s created. The Brush Detail value can range from 1 to 14, with 14 retaining the most image detail and 1 yielding a splatter effect reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s work. Depending on the nature of the picture you are converting and your own preferences, I suggest that you start experimenting with Brush Detail settings in the neighborhood of 7–9. The Shadow Intensity slider ranges from 0 to 10, but unless you’ve lightened the picture ahead of time, leave it at 0 or 1. The Watercolor filter darkens shadows quite a bit, even at the 0 setting; with Shadow Intensity settings past 3 to 4, some pictures are almost totally black. The Texture setting can vary from 1 to 3 and produce a mottled effect that adds to the natural feel of the brush strokes. The effect is quite subtle; it’s much more noticeable when you combine it with lower Brush Detail settings. In Figure 9.3 (in the following Try It Yourself exercise), you can see the differences among varying combinations of Brush Detail and Texture settings.
Convert a Photograph to a Watercolor
You might not want to convert all your photos into imitation watercolors, but the Watercolor filter does amazing things with some images.
Choose one of your own pictures that you think would look good as a watercolor, or download the one shown here from the book’s website. It’s called
pinkpeony.jpg. Open the downloaded file in Photoshop and make any color and brightness adjustments you think necessary. I lightened the background quite a bit using Shadows/Highlights and then increased the Vibrance setting to the maximum. (If you’ve forgotten how to adjust the image’s colors, turn back to Hour 5 to refresh your memory.) Remember not to let the colors get too dark before you start applying filters. Photoshop filters, in general, tend to add more black to the image. To avoid too much distracting detail in the picture’s foreground, I also blurred the grass below the flower.Choose Filter, Artistic, Watercolor.
In the Watercolor filter dialog, which you saw in Figure 9.2, use the sliders to settle on a combination of Texture and Brush Detail values that you like the looks of. Set the shadow intensity to 0, unless you want a lot of black in the image (see Figure 9.4).
Move the thumbnail image to check details by clicking and dragging the hand symbol that appears when you place your cursor in the thumbnail window and zooming in where necessary by clicking the + and – buttons.
When you’re done, click OK to apply the changes.
If the picture seems drab, you can use the Sponge tool set to Saturate, to intensify the colors.
Sometimes you don’t have a photo of what you want to paint or perhaps you’re looking to achieve a different effect than the Watercolor filter can produce. With some careful brushing, you can produce watercolors that you’d almost swear were painted with a real brush on real paper.
You learned about working with the Brush tool in Hour 8, “Different Ways to Paint.” As I’m sure you recall, using the Tool Options bar, you can switch from a large brush to a small one, or change the opacity of the paint the Brush applies, with just a click. I also like to open the Swatches panel, add the colors I want to paint with, and use it as a paint box to choose colors, instead of going to the Color Picker each time I want to switch paint colors. Feel free to flip back if you need to review any of these techniques.
Tip: Sort Your Panels
If you drag the tabs at the top of the panels, you can move them around so that you can use the Layers, History, Color, and Swatches panels all at once, or any combination of panels you need. Close the panels you aren’t using to make more room, and dock the panels you’re most likely to need—for instance, Brushes, Layers, Color, and History—in the dock at the right side of your screen.
Transparency is one of the distinguishing features of real watercolor. To make a “synthetic” watercolor, you’ll want to set the Brush opacity at no more than 75%, which means that your paint will be 25% transparent—about right for watercolors. Try the brush on a blank canvas, and you’ll notice that painting over a previous stroke darkens the color. Click the Wet Edges check box in the Brushes panel for even more authentic-looking brush strokes. This option adds extra color along the edges of a stroke, making it look as if the pigment gathered there the way it does when you paint with a watery brush.
Watercolor artists painting on paper often start with an outline and then fill in the details. Figure 9.5 shows a “watercolor” painting of Doolittle the tiger cat. Painting in her stripes was time-consuming but easy, and when I was done, I added some texture to make the picture appear to be done on real paper. While working, I switched brushes often, zoomed in and out, and used the Smudge tool to keep my details soft and wet looking.
Another useful trick for creating a watercolor is to use the Eraser as if it were a brush full of plain water, to lighten a color that you have applied too darkly. Set the Eraser to a very low opacity to lighten a color slightly or to a high opacity to clean up around the edges of the picture where needed. Don’t forget that the Eraser always erases to the Background color, which might or might not match the “paper” color you’re using. If you have been changing colors as you paint, be sure to set the Background color to what you want to see when you erase, or keep your painting on a separate layer from the Background layer.
Most real watercolors are painted on heavily textured watercolor paper, like the surface I created in Figure 9.5. If you want yours to have the same character, you can use the Texturizer filter (choose Filter, Texture, Texturizer) to add a simulated watercolor paper texture to the picture after your painting is completed. Don’t apply the filter until you’re sure you’re done painting, though, because additional changes you make will obscure the texture. Figure 9.6 shows the Texturizer filter being applied.
Note: Take One Tablet
For painting in Photoshop, a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet is darn near required. Drawing with a stylus is far more natural than drawing with a mouse or trackball, and the pressure-sensitivity of most tablets permits you to make trailing brush strokes that look far more realistic than anything you can produce without a tablet.
Tip: Keeping It Real
Try applying the same texture a second time, with the light coming from the opposite direction, to produce a really good imitation of textured paper. Or you can try printing your images on real watercolor paper; you should find that lighter-weight papers run through a desktop inkjet printer just fine.
The Canvas texture comes the closest to replicating watercolor paper, especially if you fiddle with the Scale to make it appropriate for the resolution of your image. Sandstone works well, too; that’s what I used for the painting of Doolittle. Use the sliders to experiment with different combinations of Relief and Scaling values.
Oil paint has a very different look from watercolor, and it’s a look that’s much easier to duplicate with Photoshop. The qualities that distinguish works in oil are the opacity of the paint, its thick texture, and the textured canvas, which adds a definite fabric grain to the image. To get the full effect in Photoshop, you can combine several techniques. We start, as artists do, with underpainting.
When an artist begins an oil painting of a landscape, she often sketches the subject with a few lines, often working with charcoal or a pencil, to position the horizon and the major masses. Then she dips a big brush in thinned-out paint and begins the process of underpainting, which blocks in all the solid areas: the sky, the ground or the sea, and any obvious features, such as a large rock, a tree, or whatever else will make up the picture. Underpainting creates a foundation for the picture, establishing the colors and values of the different parts of the image. After that, the artist must fill in the details.
Photoshop’s Underpainting filter analyzes the image to which you’re applying it and converts it to solid patches of color. In Figure 9.7, I’m applying the filter to a photo of an iron gate in an elaborate garden. If you want to download this photo and work along, it’s called gardengate, and it’s at the Sams website.
Using the Underpainting filter requires making some settings decisions. The Texture settings are exactly the same as in the Texturizer filter I used on the watercolor of Doolittle earlier in this hour. Here, however, you want to bring out more of the texture, so you’ll use a higher Relief value and possibly a greater Scaling value as well. You can paint on canvas, burlap, sandstone, or brick, or on textures that you import from elsewhere. The Brush Size setting ranges from 0 to 40. Smaller brushes retain more of the detail in the original image, and larger brushes give somewhat blotchy coverage and remove more detail. Texture Coverage also varies on a scale from 0 to 40. Lower numbers here reveal less texture; higher numbers bring out more. In real-life underpainting, the texture is visible only where there’s paint, not all over the canvas.
Turn a Scene into an Oil Painting
Let’s apply the oil paint technique to a photo and see how the results differ from those you can achieve with watercolor techniques.
As always, start by preparing the picture. Adjust the brightness and colors if necessary, rotate the image if it’s not straight, and crop as needed.
Choose Filter, Artistic, Underpainting to open the Underpainting filter dialog.
Set the Brush Size slider to 10 and the Texture Coverage value to 6; these settings will retain most of the detail in the picture.
Set the Texture to Canvas and Scaling to somewhere around 100%. You want to keep the texture small so that it doesn’t interfere with the detail you will be adding to the picture later, but big enough to show.
Set the Relief slider to 3 and the Light Direction to Top Right. This shows just enough texture to establish that your painting is on canvas instead of stone. The Light Direction matches the position of the sun in the original photo.
Click OK to apply the filter. Figure 9.8 shows the result so far.
The Underpainting filter is the first step in the “oil painting” process; the second step is to overpaint the areas that need to have detail, so that’s what you’ll do to complete this garden scene.
Because oil paintbrushes tend to be rather stiff, choose a hard brush instead of a soft-edged one. Make sure that Wet Edges is turned off in the Brushes panel. Although the Normal blending mode will work fine for some parts of the painting—wherever you want to make sharp strokes of paint—Dissolve might be a more useful mode for working into the trees. Use it, as shown in Figure 9.9, to stipple colors into the underpainting. (Stippling means to paint with the very end of a hard round brush, placing dots instead of strokes of paint. Dissolve replicates this effect very well.) Vary the Brush Size and Opacity settings to add more or less paint with each stroke.
You can go on painting in this picture until it looks exactly like an oil painting, or you can use it as a basis for experimentation with other filters and effects. In Figure 9.10, I’ve reapplied the Texturizer filter (Filter, Texture, Texturizer) to restore the texture lost during the overpainting process.
The Pencil tool has been part of every graphics program since the very first ones, and it definitely deserves its place. It shares a space in the toolbox with the Brush tool and the Color Replacement tool. You can draw with it just as you would with a real pencil, except that you can specify its width by choosing a brush tip, or you can use it (or any of the Painting tools) in a sort of connect-the-dots mode. Click where you want a line to begin, and Shift-click where it should end; Photoshop draws the line for you. Keep Shift-clicking to add more line segments. If you click the Auto-Erase function on the Tool Options bar, the Pencil tool can also serve as an eraser. With Auto-Erase enabled, when you click the Pencil on a colored pixel that is the current Foreground color, you erase it to the current Background color. This fact can save you a lot of time switching between the Pencil and the Eraser when you’re drawing.
The Pencil is great for retouching and drawing simple shapes, but it’s difficult to use for a more complex drawing. You’ll find that it’s easier to use, however, if you zoom in to 200% so that you can see the individual pixels in the image. Setting your mouse acceleration to Slow also helps, but it’s better to use a graphics tablet instead of a mouse (see “Using a Pressure-Sensitive Tablet,” later in this hour, to learn more).
If you want to get the look of a pencil drawing without all the effort, start with a photo and try the Colored Pencil filter (choose Filter, Artistic, Colored Pencil) or the Crosshatch filter (choose Filter, Brush Strokes, Crosshatch). The Colored Pencil filter, shown in Figure 9.11, turns your original image into a light, somewhat stylized drawing using the Foreground and Background colors. If you convert the drawing to grayscale (using the Black & White adjustment command) after applying the filter, it looks as though it were done with black pencil instead of colored pencil. The Crosshatch filter, applied to the same image in Figure 9.12, retains much more of the original image’s color and detail, but the result still looks like a pen-and-ink drawing.
Charcoal is one of the oldest known art media, and chalk is pretty darn close. Some of the earliest cave drawings were done with charred sticks pulled from a fire, and early artists soon learned to mix charcoal with grease to make paint. If you’ve never seen any of these very old drawings, check out the pictures at the Bradshaw Foundation’s web pages about Cosquer Cage in France (www.bradshawfoundation.com/cosquer/).
Chalk and charcoal are still beloved by artists today for their ease of use and versatile lines. You can make sharp lines or smudged ones, depending on how you hold the chalk or charcoal stick. And modern chalk drawings can be found on virtually any surface, from grained paper to brick walls and concrete sidewalks. You can put your “chalk” drawings in Photoshop on sandstone, burlap, or a texture that you’ve imported from another source.
Chalk and charcoal are both linear materials, meaning that they’re used to draw lines instead of fill in large flat areas, like paints. Choose pictures to apply the Charcoal and Chalk & Charcoal filters to with that fact in mind. Of course, you can apply shading as a pattern of lines or crosshatching, and you can smudge to your heart’s content. If you’re drawing from scratch, start with a fairly simple line drawing and expand on it. If you’re converting a photo into a chalk or charcoal drawing, choose one that has strong line patterns and well-defined detail.
When you apply the Chalk & Charcoal filter (choose Filter, Sketch, Chalk & Charcoal), you’ll see that it reduces your picture to three colors: gray plus the Foreground and Background colors that you have set in the toolbox. Chalk uses the Background color and Charcoal becomes the Foreground color. Areas that aren’t colored appear in gray. Experimentation will help you find the right colors for each image, but you’ll probably want to stick with a light Background color and a darker Foreground color; otherwise, the image ends up with dark and light areas reversed, like a photo negative.
Figure 9.13 shows the Chalk & Charcoal dialog, which controls how this filter works. In it, you can set values for the amount of Chalk and Charcoal coverage. These sliders have a range from 0 to 20. Start somewhere in the middle and adjust until you get a combination that works for your picture. The Stroke Pressure varies from 0 to 5. Unless you want the picture to turn into areas of flat color, keep the setting at 1 or 2. Intensity builds up very quickly with this filter. The Foreground color for this image is black, but the Background color is a light peach.
Convert a Photograph to a Chalk and Charcoal Drawing
The Chalk & Charcoal filter looks great with any reasonably high-contrast subject. Try it on a portrait.
Open the image, set your Foreground and Background colors, and then choose Filter, Sketch, Chalk & Charcoal.
Set both the Charcoal and Chalk Area sliders to 10 or less. When you work with a filter for the first time, always start in the middle of the settings range to get an idea of what the filter does, and increase or decrease as necessary. It’s often also useful to set all the sliders at their lowest point and then at their highest point, too.
Set the Stroke Pressure slider to 1 or 2. Move on to step 4 if you like the view in the preview area, or experiment with other numbers until you’re happy.
Click OK to apply the filter. Study the result. Decide what areas need touching up.
Switch to the Eraser tool and erase some of the extraneous charcoal, to bring up more of the Background color.
Select the Brush tool to apply more of the Foreground color, also known in this situation as chalk. Press X to swap the Foreground and Background colors quickly.
Use the Eyedropper to select the gray, if you need to apply it elsewhere. (The gray is an arbitrary color this filter uses and can’t be adjusted within the dialog—but you can use the techniques you learned in Hour 5 to modify it afterward.)
When you’re satisfied with the drawing, save it (see Figure 9.14).
The Smudge tool works particularly well with the Chalk & Charcoal filter. Use it exactly as you would use your finger or the side of your hand on paper to soften a line or blend two colors. You can also use Photoshop’s Blur and Sharpen tools to define edges or to soften a line without smudging it.
Use the Charcoal filter (choose Filter, Sketch, Charcoal) to convert a photograph to a reasonably good imitation of a charcoal drawing. Because charcoal doesn’t come in colors, your “charcoal” drawings will be most realistic if you set the foreground to black and the background to white, or to another pale color if you want the effect of drawing on colored paper. Figure 9.15 shows the Charcoal filter dialog. You can adjust the thickness of the charcoal line from 1 to 7, and the degree of detail it retains from 0 to 5. The Light/Dark Balance setting ranges from 0 to 100 and controls the proportion of Foreground to Background color in the filtered image.
Figure 9.16 shows a portrait converted using the Charcoal filter and lightly retouched with the Brush, Blur, and Sharpen tools. Using a graphics tablet instead of a mouse makes it much easier to reproduce the filter’s crosshatched lines with the Brush.
Sometimes you’ll apply a filter and get perfect results—in 90% of the image. Elsewhere, you wish you could back off just a bit, or even just revert those areas of the image to the way they were. That’s what the History Brush is for. If you get heavily into using combinations of filters, you’ll find this tool indispensable. And the Art History Brush is a neat twist on the basic concept, applying swirling brush strokes to the image as it paints.
The History Brush comes in handy when you’re making changes in an image and aren’t sure exactly how much change to make or where to make it (which describes most artists most of the time). It enables you to apply a bunch of changes and then selectively restore parts of the picture by choosing a brush size and painting over the new image with the old one. In Figure 9.17, I applied the Glowing Edges filter to a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, and then I used the History Brush to undo the effect of the filter in a few areas of the photo.
To use the History Brush, click the box at the left side of the History panel (choose Window, History) next to the history state you want to use as the source. To produce Figure 9.17, I clicked the original image because I wanted to restore parts of it in the altered version. Then switch to the History Brush, choose a brush shape and size, and start painting.
The Art History Brush shares a slot in the toolbox with the History Brush, and you can press Shift+Y to toggle between the two. The Art History Brush tool paints with a variety of stylized strokes, but—like the History Brush—it draws its source data from a specified history state or a snapshot. If you don’t want to paint in an older version of the image, just click next to the latest history state in the History panel. The Art History Brush offers a menu of different kinds of strokes. After you’ve chosen a stroke and a brush size, you can paint onto the image with the chosen stroke, turning your image into something perhaps resembling an Impressionist watercolor, a Pointillist oil, or some other artistic style. Figure 9.18 shows the Art History Brush’s Styles pop-up menu on the Tool Options bar.
In Figure 9.19, I’ve applied the Art History Brush to a photo, and then I’ve gone back into it with the History Brush to restore some of the edges and detail.
The Art History Brush can produce some really nice effects, if you spend time learning to work with its settings. Even more than most tools in Photoshop, it takes practice to use correctly.
As you become more accustomed to creating art in Photoshop (or in any other graphics program, for that matter) you’ll realize that dragging a mouse around your desktop isn’t the best way to draw, to put it mildly. As for using a trackball or a touchpad—well, they’re even more difficult. These tools simply weren’t designed for creating artwork.
The natural way for people to create a picture is to pick up a pencil, pen, or brush and draw on something. People have been doing it for thousands of years, all the way back to the cave painters I mentioned earlier in this hour, who used crude crayons made of animal fat and colored clays; the ancient Sumerians, who created images using a sharpened stylus and a slab of wet clay; and the ancient Egyptians, who wrote and drew with squid ink and feathers on papyrus, a paperlike material made from fibrous plant stems.
Today we have something much better: graphics tablets that are designed specifically to work with Photoshop and other programs like it. These consist of a flat drawing surface, sometimes tethered to the computer by a cable and sometimes wireless, and a stylus about the size and weight of a ballpoint pen, sometimes having an eraser at its top end. The drawing surface is sensitive to the stylus’s motion and pressure, and translates that information into the movements of the cursor on your screen. A tablet such as the Wacom Bamboo (www.wacom.com/bambootablet/) costs less than $100 and will save you a good deal of time and frustration when you’re trying to draw or paint in Photoshop. Try one at your local computer store, and you’ll quickly be as hooked on it as I am.
Although Photoshop wasn’t originally designed as a true paint program—it’s really an image editor—digital painting is definitely within the program’s capabilities. You can create drawings and paintings from scratch or convert digital photos to simulated natural-media works using filters. Photoshop’s myriad filters and Painting tools enable you to turn your work into a decent imitation of an oil painting, watercolor, or drawing. The Artistic filter set, in particular, includes filters that can do much of the work of conversion for you. For best results, though, you’ll nearly always want to touch up the picture after the filter has done its magical work. For this touch-up phase, choose tools and colors that are appropriate to the medium you’re trying to imitate. You can even use the History Brush to restore lost detail, and the Art History Brush to apply sweeping brush strokes to an image.
Find a picture with a good range of light and dark colors and moderate detail. Apply the filters discussed in this hour to the picture, and be sure to experiment with different Background and Foreground colors, as well as with various settings for brush width, pressure, and so on. After working with the original photo, try prepping it as described earlier in the Q&A section, and see if your changes make a difference in the results you achieve.