No, No, No...This Is Supposed To Be A Watercolour!!!

I went to Cockwood Harbour to photograph the kettles on the Cornish Riviera Express last week and believe it or not I stood alongside a gentleman bumping his gums to a friend about photoshop abuse. Fortunately my 11 year old granddaughter chuckled and kept her mouth shut as did I. I posted the picture, admired it on the front page of my website and instinct told me that I should have posted it as a watercolour. Problem was I didn't like the watercolour in my tutorial, and neither did I like any of the other watercolours in Google.

So I set about putting one together over a couple hours and this is how the original looked...

http://www.margam-depot.co.uk/images/6024-cockwoodh-260610w.jpg

and this is how my watercolour ended up...

http://www.margam-depot.co.uk/images/6024-cockwoodh-260610mm-w.jpg

Sorry, I forgot to write down the recipe, but this is how it goes. The watercolour effect is applied after resizing and editing and uses the watercolour filter as its base, (Filter>Artistic>Watercolour). The watercolour filter on its own is pretty crude even with a blending mode and reduced opacity. The recipe in producing a pleasing watercolour is to blend a multitude of artistic filters, subtly blended together with their own blending modes and opacities sandwiched between the emboss filter (Filter>Stylize>Emboss) which gives the watercolour a three dimensional lift. For this watercolour I used Watercolour, Emboss, Emboss again, Canvas Texture, Dry Brush and Cut Out filters in this order.

Have a go yourself, its great fun to pass a few hours away on a rainy night.