Creative Interpretations - Spanish Fishing Village

[Swampy]

Are you up for a challenge? Can you paint a watercolor? Try to do it using only the filters that come native with your paint program. No 3rd party filters allowed.

In mine, I used Filter>Distort>Displace. The rest was PST, desaturation, and blend modes and my Line art Tute.

[palms]

Nice challenge Swampy, should be very interesting all the different techniques and interpretations of "watercolour"

This technique is from a tutorial i read, I liked it and made it into a easy to use action, it uses
cut out
dry brush
and median
and a simple sketch layer

Like everything else it wont work on all images, but in using the action it only takes a little time to work out if it will work ! ! !

Palms



Palms

[Swampy]

Oh, my, Palms, that is just fantastic. I notice you've been using cut out a lot lately. It's a filter I seldom use so I'll have to explore it.

[Frank Lopes]

Swampy,

It has been a while since I tried one of these:

Added a background with texturizer
Used the Smudge Stick filter on the image
Converted the image layer to Multiply
Applied the Diffuse filter to the image edge
Drop shadow in the background

Originally Posted by Swampy

Are you up for a challenge? Can you paint a watercolor? Try to do it using only the filters that come native with your paint program. No 3rd party filters allowed.

In mine, I used Filter>Distort>Displace. The rest was PST, desaturation, and blend modes and my Line art Tute.

[Swampy]

Frank... another wonderful intrepretation. Thanks for the workflow. I like the simple paintings without all the filters. It is a challenge to turn a photo into a nice piece of art that granny would hang in her house. LOL

[Alcar]

A watercolor but with more blurring.
Alan

[oltenius]

Very nice village in Spain!
I liked the artworks from everyone!
I used a crop, usm, dry brush and reduced the opacity of the layer, selective color and other adjustments, texture.
Dan

[Swampy]

Alan, it's almost cubist. I love it! :-)

Dan, that is a super crop! Wow. Nice job.

[lkroll]

OK Dee Dee; just don't tie my hands again. lol

GIMP's Cubism filter (small tile size means very long processing time on my aging machine; yes, I like to complain. lol), followed by a Hue/Sat adjustment and then applied Clothify Script-fu (it ships with GIMP by default, and you said only use what comes with your editor of choice). If my hands were not so tied, but would have added other cool filters as well as a few third party GIMP preset/filters, but hey; you get what you see since you made the rules. lol

[Sweetlight]

I know it's one of the last of tons of attempts but here it is anyways.
Enjoy.
c

[alexmeta]

... and mine AHB

[Mining Art]

I really like the one by alexmeta. I cropped, simplified to 256 colors, converted to postscript, brightened it up a bit and saved as raster.

[alexmeta]

Mining Art, thank you.
Another one AHB

[palms]

See i knew you had a winner here Swampy what great images
well spotted i have been using cut out more, it works great when mixed with other filters ( although Alexmeta has done some great portrait work with it and Peter S has had more than a good dabble with it )
Frank I like the edges and will give your workflow a try out
Alcar interesting as said almost cubist
Dan excellent will look into your workflow as well
lkroll your hands may have been tied but it was worth it
Sweetlight the crop has made that into quite a dramatic piece
Alex two great ahb's hard to decide if i like one better than the other, no i think i like the both equal
Mining art nice I like the simplification

Here is another one from a tutorial Danny posted the link too some time ago but added texture and tweaked the colour around

Palms

[Swampy]

LK, I know you love your filters (you and Craig), but, for what it's worth your version is one of the best true "paintings" I've seen from you! :-) You did a wonderful job of pushing pixels around so they look like pigment spreading on paper! :-)

Sweetlight, The crop is great and darkening up that land formation in the background really sets off the village.

Alex, Some of your waves in the first one look almost transluscent! That's terriffic. The color simplification in the second one is really good.

MiningArt, going vector then coming back? What program are you using? It sure gives an interesting result.

Palms, your second one is soft and lovely. It's a little more photorealistic than the first, but I like it.

You folks have really accepted the challenge and the results are amazing!

[Alcar]

Just one more attempt.
Alan

[Swampy]

Alan... nice and "drippy"! Wonderful!

[Mining Art]

Swampy; MiningArt, going vector then coming back? What program are you using? It sure gives an interesting result.

I ran it through CR2V, now called Vector Eye, a raster to vector converter. It does a good job of merging detail and I made no other changes. A little texture would be nice maybe.
-----

This one I did in Zoner Draw5. Enhanced the colors, reduced to 8bit 256 colors and applied a paint effect.

[Swampy]

Ahhh. I could probably do the same thing taking it to Live Trace in Illustrator.

[Bob Mc]

Great picture and even better results everyone.

2 good ones Palms. Is the technique from Danny an action or his other magic?

Alan your newer watercolor's are terrific.

Here's mine basically starting using "Tony's Wishy Washy Watercolor technique" found over in Innographics with some minor changes - all PS7 tho

Regards and Happy New Year
Bob Mc

[Swampy]

Wow, Bob, your crop really puts a different perspective on the piece. Very nice.

[Alcar]

The workflow for my last submission in this thread, as best as I can remember: (1) simplify with buzz; (2) new white layer and mask; (3) paint image on white layer with watercolor brush and make ragged border with textured brush; (4) duplicate simplified layer, add impressionist plugin (damp translucent style modified): (5) use hide all mask to spot paint watercolor texture here and there and soften hard lines; (6) add hue/saturation layer and use mask to increase color here and there; (7) flatten layers and dupe; (8) apply sketch>photocopy (foreground color must be black) and change mode to color burn; (9) spot paint using low opacity to deepen and sharpen facets of building and “pooling” of watercolor strokes; (10) sharpen. Alan

[Swampy]

Wonderful workflow, Alan, Thank you so much! I'll have to remember the masking out of some paint strokes. I'm assuming that is how you got so much white (like in the buildings).

[Alcar]

Swampy, I did forget that I may have added a levels adjustment layer and used the white setting point to add white to the buildings. This often has the side benefit of changing the overall color characteristics of the image. Alan

[Swampy]

Gotcha, Alan. It's easy to think in terms of adding brush strokes, but not intuitive to remove them. LOL

[Peter S]

Nice idea Swampy
All PS stuff used here.
1 duped
2 slight Gaussian blur to BG
3 Dry brush to BG
4 Smart blur to BG
5 Desat dupe
6 Smart blur dupe (edges only)
7 Invert dupe
8 blend mode dupe to multiply and fade opacity and diffuse aniso to soften.
9 add new layer between BG and dupe and fill with white
10 add mask to white layer and fill with black
11 choose spatter brush and paint with white on mask
12 Levels AL for overall adjustment.

Sorry Palms no cut out used at all this time.


Peter

[Swampy]

Oh, My, Peter! that is really cool. Thanks for the work flow. (Swampy scribbling notes here).

[CJ Swartz]

Such a beautiful image, Swampy! So many lovely variations made me want to try some of the suggestions -- I used a color sketch layer, some dry brush, many color range layers, etc. etc.

[Swampy]

Wow, CJ... Love that sky. It really sets a wonderful mood. Well done.

[Hapsmig]

Hi

Here are my version of the image. I correted the horison. Made som sharpening and bluring on the LAB file. Copied the layer, blured it and set to overlay. Then some color corretion and at the end some noise. It was my intention to make it like then sun is about to go down.