New Watercolor Brushes for Photoshop

If you are an artist or graphic designer, you probably experimented on the various features of Photoshop in creating your artworks and designs. You might also have tried to replicate various painting or drawing styles in Photoshop. You may have tried touching up a photograph of a classic artwork or a painting that you have done yourself. Discovering new ways to digitally replicate the visual characteristics of physical objects or images could be challenging. Even the seemingly simple watercolor effect is relatively hard to replicate in Photoshop if you are not skillful or knowledgeable enough. The watercolor effect is something that is relatively hard to accomplish without proper plugins.

Even if you are experienced and skilled in using Photoshop, you probably resorted to experimenting on different image filters, wet edges brush setting, overlaid textures, and other similar effects just to approximate the visual style of an actual watercolor painting. Finding ways to combine the various features and adjust the settings in Photoshop is creativity in itself. However, the entire process could be tedious, time-consuming and frustrating. If you are the perfectionist type, you might as well use real watercolor and canvas in creating your designs and simply scan or photograph them for digital manipulations.

Several plugins and brushes are commercially available and you may try the various versions. However, the brushes recently developed and released by Kyle T Webster are among the recommended brushes. His re-mastered set has more than 100 finely-tuned watercolor brushes. This means that you can directly render the watercolor effects by simply choosing from among the various brushes. There is no need for complicated adjustments of settings or experimenting on multiple filters. You simply have to select brushes from the options. You do not need to add any layer effects to texture effects. You can do freehand painting as if you are using real watercolors. The brushes have natural wedge effects, bleeds and textures.

Below are links to video demos of the brushes as done by Kyle on some impromptu artworks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXJvyBo8AX8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLuwFZXOiT4

You may combine the brushed to produce truly impressive effects. You can experiment on various combinations that best suit your style. You can take your digital artwork to the next level by using the additional brushes of salt, alcohol, spatter and soft blenders. These can be used for quick finishing touches. You will have complete control over your digital painting and you may even surprise yourself.

It is important to note that these brushes only work on Photoshop CS5 or higher versions. If you want a realistic freehand painting, using a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet is the best way to do it. It would be like finger-painting.