Evening rolls around and I have some more art to post. This is another request for CyberFox on deviantART:
If anyone can offer water color advice or general tips I'd be happy to hear it. I messed around with the watercolor settings on FireAlpaca for about an hour today and I can safely say I still have no idea what I'm doing. I do slightly understand two settings now: ease of mixing' and 'load color. The only thing I'm even remotely comfortable with is when the settings are set to the extremes. For example, ease of mixing-100 and load color-0 results in what I call 'Watercolor Blend', which mixes the surrounding colors very easily and doesn't contribute any of it's own color. Sometimes it results in a glassy texture. This can be useful for blending two divergent colors, like the yellow lighting on a pink bird's back. The other setting I worked with was ease of mixing-100 and load color-100. This makes a nice, solid color line with slight influences from the surrounding colors; I would say it feels thick and drippy. I call this "WaterColorColor". This would be the basic tool for introducing new colors into your piece
If you set ease of mixing-0, load color-100, you basically get the general pen tool as it is a solid line with no traces from the surrounding colors. And lastly we have what I call "Color Ditto", which is set to ease of mixing-0, load color-0. It takes whatever color you begin your line on and becomes that color in a solid line until you lift the pen. I don't feel very comfortable with this tool yet, although it seems like it could be useful with grass. I will have to find more uses for it later. I also had all these brushes set on opacity 100.
I won't start on all the possible inbetween settings because I do not at all understand or feel comfortable with them yet, and I think 3 basic settings is more than enough for now especially when you have to factor in line thickness, hue, saturation, what strokes to use, etc etc. Previously on my Bastiovire piece I was using some random settings somewhere in the middle and I was not happy with the progress.
here is my worksheet for trying to figure out the water color settings if you're at all interested.