Creating a Watercolour Illustration with a Camera, a Pencil and Photoshop (but no Watercolours…)

Having just completed the Town Guide for the tourist information centre in our home town of Ashburton, I thought I would explain a bit about how the front cover illustration was created. I think it’s particularly interesting because although it looks like it’s been created using traditional techniques, namely watercolour paints, it mostly uses digital processes and no real paint whatsoever!

Here’s how it was done:

The Original Photograph

The first step was to take a photograph to work from. In the past we had used street scenes of the town, but this year a decision was made to get a view of the whole town from it’s surrounding hills. Since the image was needed for reference only, it didn’t need to be of amazing quality, so I used the phone on my camera. Its pretty terrible as photographs go, but was fine for my purposes. It took a bit of wandering and driving around to get a suitable composition that didn’t involve trespassing on private land. In the end the final view was achieved from a roadside by standing on a muddy verge…

A Pencil Sketch

I then produced a sketch from the photograph using a simple HB pencil and some photocopy paper. This took a fair few hours, since there was a lot of detail in there, particularly with all the houses. When it was complete, the sketch was scanned into Photoshop.

A Quick Edit and Contrast Boost

I decided to remove the bushes and trace of the A38 from the foreground using Photoshop’s eraser tool, then darkened the pencil marks using the ‘Brightness and Contrast’ image adjustment function.

The Sky and Grass

This was where the fun began. I started by adding a couple of free watercolour textures by Go Media http://arsenal.gomedia.us/freebies.html. The textures were positioned, scaled and recoloured (the originals were a lurid red and yellow). Since this was the first layer of watercolour effect, the opacity of the textures was reduced.

More Background Texture

Another layer of watercolour texture was placed over the main sketch of the town. This provided colour for the trees and open spaces. Using a mask and a brush with a low opacity, I smoothed away some of the texture where it wasn’t required and began to give some of the objects areas of shading to help make them appear three-dimensional.

Digital Painting!

Here I have hidden the pencil sketch layer to show how the main areas of colour were added. In practice, I needed the sketch to be visible to see where I needed to colour. The brush tool at varying levels of opacity was used to achieve this, along with the eyedropper, to sample original colours from the source photograph.

This is what it looks like against the pencil layer:

Finishing

Here’s the finished result, without the typographics or logo that are present on the printed cover. The colour saturation was increased slightly, to make the scene appear sunnier and less overcast – it is meant to attract tourists to the town, after all!

Conclusion

I hope you have enjoyed seeing behind the scenes of this particular work. Please feel free to comment or ask questions in the section below.