Watercolor minus water

Painting watercolors is a lot harder than it may look… especially when there’s not a single drop of H2O involved!
Over the week-end I tried to simulate the look of Chinese or Japanese watercolor paintings using good ol’ Fractal Design Painter, with very mixed results. Some of the effects of watercolors can be achieved with relative ease, but others I was simply unable to reproduce. I’m currently downloading the trial version of Corel Painter IX, which supposedly includes a much improved watercolor engine… and perhaps I need to spend on a new graphics tablet, my Graphire 2 being a few years old and lacking newer features such as tilt sensitivity, which should improve my paint-strokes quite a bit.

The backgrounds in my film will be painted mostly in a style inspired by traditional Japanese landscape paintings, so achieving a convincing effect will be essential to the outcome of the final product.