Faux Watercolor
So I’m basically stealing this post idea from Pioneer Woman. If you haven’t checked her out yet, she’s great. I read this recent post and got inspired to try my own hand at painting with the Photoshop Artistic effects. I took a photo of this flower, a delphinium I believe, growing in my mom’s lush and beautiful garden in July of this year. My mother is a woman of many, many talents and one of those many talents is to grow beautiful things - not just flowers.
So I thought I’d try the watercolor effect. I’ve always dreamed of being able to paint but I haven’t yet been able to train my hands to cooperate, so in the mean time, I’ll experiment with manipulating photos. Besides, I think it might help me be a bit more familiar with Photoshop if I’m actually practicing things.
So here is the before:
Here is the after:
My original photo had some out of focus areas - I used a pretty large aperture (f/3.3) so the background is blurred but so is part of the flower. I think the blurred areas actually help the watercolor to look better. I think it would look really cool printed on knobby, thick watercolor paper and then attached to a greeting card. In fact, I am toying with the idea of setting a goal to make a set of greeting cards. I think that might be a really fun project.
So, back to photographing children… You could totally do this with photos of your kids or anything that you would like to see like that. Studios charge lots of money for prints that just have this simple effect on them. Who needs those stinking studios, anyway?!? OK, maybe we do, but not today!
I would love to see any photos that you have played with and added an artistic effect. Post them to the Momshots Flickr Group. It will be fun to see what you’ve done!
August 10th, 2008 at 11:55 am
suggestion… if the photo is out of focus or really dark in some areas, adjust the quality of the photo before adding effects. If you were to lighten the photo, adjust the highlights and shadows, then the contrast, the find edges filter will work a bit better… lighter colors work well with the watercolor feature, AND you can add a texture to the result to make it look like it was painted on watercolor paper of even canvas
I think I will add this idea to a future weekly tip 
Cheers! Keep playing, you will be surprised at the neat stuff you can accomplish with photo-manipulation!
August 11th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Jessica, If you guys are able to stop at the waterfalls, I’d love to meet you there! If you want to too, let me know.
Vicki
PS: Maybe we could meet for a hike at Arches someday, too
August 20th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Cool! But I need to agree with Tye about lighter colors working better with the artistic watercolor effect. You can overlap effects, as well. I’ve put watercolor down first, then overlapped with paint daubs, adjusting the brush width and settings. I recently joined Paintbox Pictures (anyone can join) where I regularly do a post using pictures that I’ve altered via Photoshop. I think you’d like it there.
Here’s the link:
http://twigley.blogspot.com/
It’s fun!