minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

Paint­ing water­col­ors is a lot harder than it may look… espe­cially when there’s not a sin­gle drop of H2O involved!
Over the week-​​end I tried to sim­u­late the look of Chi­nese or Japan­ese water­color paint­ings using good ol’ Frac­tal Design Painter, with very mixed results. Some of the effects of water­col­ors can be achieved with rel­a­tive ease, but oth­ers I was sim­ply unable to repro­duce. I’m cur­rently down­load­ing the trial ver­sion of Corel Painter IX, which sup­pos­edly includes a much improved water­color engine… and per­haps I need to spend on a new graph­ics tablet, my Graphire 2 being a few years old and lack­ing newer fea­tures such as tilt sen­si­tiv­ity, which should improve my paint-​​strokes quite a bit.

The back­grounds in my film will be painted mostly in a style inspired by tra­di­tional Japan­ese land­scape paint­ings, so achiev­ing a con­vinc­ing effect will be essen­tial to the out­come of the final product.