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painting/watercolor/trad art effect with the default photoshop brushes

a quick tutorial for @attributions-share, who was curious about how i did the “trad art” thingy on this piece!

Note : My photoshop is in french. So you’ll have well, french screenshots oui oui

Brushes

We’re using three photoshop default brushes, one for lines and two for painting.

Steps

Brush number one is the one I line with. This is a quick example that showcases my barbaric default linery but i do strongly recommend you go a bit lighter on your hand and make use of pen pressure to make good lines that vary in size!

Then with brush number two I fill the shape with a flat color  on a new layer (do this for every flat color, i recomment one layer per flat) which I alpha-lock when finished.

Then with brush number three I apply my color variations : I paint on the same color layer, brush at lowered opacity. Since the layer is alpha locked no need to worry about coloring outside the borders.

[optional] When that’s done, alpha-lock the line layer and give it slight color variations with the same brush. I like using dark and very saturated colors there

Then download your best high res paper texture and paste it on another layer so is covers all your art, and put the layer on Multiply mode. What that does is make your layer be more or less transparent depending on how much white is in one place. On a white paper image, it will make it transparent but keep the nooks and crannies of the texture.

And that’s it!

Final result :

the morality of this story is that photoshop layer options are your friends