brushes for paintings?

[michaelvs]

I need to edit a painting made by black ink and colored with watercolor. What I need is to add a few more objects.

I am wondering how to better do this.

1) First of all what kind of brushes should I use
- to emulate black ink
- to emulate watecolor brushes

I was trying standard brushes, but it's not what I need because they make very clear and absolutely perfect lines, which are different from what I have in the painting.

2) I should probably do this on a separate layer, so what blend mode should I use for this layer?

Thank you
Michael

 

[George Peirson]

Hi Michael, you need to look at a couple of settings for the brushes. First look at the hardness setting, you can go from completely hard edge to a very very soft edge. Pick the hardness setting that most closely matches the look you want. Second look at the opacity and flow settings, these will control how solid the stroke looks on the page. Again try a few different settings to see which one is the closest. It may take some experimentation to get this right, and you will probably need to adjust these settings for different parts of your picture.

The look of the original image will depend on the type of ink used in the painting, the dilution of the ink, how fast it bleeds into the paper, how absorbent the paper is, etc. So real hard to give a specific recommendation, too many variables.

I could give you a general discussion of blending modes, but it is best to learn by experimentation. There aren't that many, so just try each one and see how the mode affects your image. Again it will depend on the settings from above and on your original image.

Take a look at the brushes drop down in the option panels when you have the brush selected, you will see lots of pre-made brushes to try. If none of these work for you there are more brushes available and if you have at least Photoshop CS5 you can customize those brushes to your hearts content.

 

[michaelvs]

Hi Michael, you need to look at a couple of settings for the brushes. First look at the hardness setting, you can go from completely hard edge to a very very soft edge. Pick the hardness setting that most closely matches the look you want. Second look at the opacity and flow settings, these will control how solid the stroke looks on the page. Again try a few different settings to see which one is the closest. It may

Thank you George! Here is a sample.
I was trying to play with hardness, opacity and flow with no luck. The problem is that the original black ink lines are too irregular compared to the ones created by Photoshop brush.

 

[George Peirson]

Hi Michael, in the brushes drop down list look at the additional drop down options menu. You will find more sets of brushes that you can add to the default set. Look at the Wet Media brushes. These have some jitter to them where the thickness changes in a random manner. In Photoshop CS5 and up you can control the jitter as one of the brush options. Or if you use a tablet and stylus you can control the thickness (Flow) using airbrush mode and stylus pressure, this would be closer to the effect you are seeing in the painting. To really do decent painting techniques in Photoshop a tablet/stylus is almost required.