i had to try this too, after seeing chris f:s and wallace's lovely pictures. i need a lot more practice and a lot more animated paisley brushes with a grungy look, but i think at least the last two came out rather nice. they're stills from bollywood movies and once i have my grungy-animated-paisley brush collection i want to make a whole series of these - faking watercolours is fun!

those came out beautiful! I am still fighting with mine.

ok, I'm beyond help with this one. Not too bad, but nothing like I envisioned, lol.

Nice work AnMal, the paisley goes well with the bollywood style.

2-Ton - looks good to me.

Very nice watercolors-fakes i see here. Yes, it makes a lot of fun to create those images.

Beautiful work AnMal. I like the top one best but I like the colours in the bottom one.

2-ton - I think it looks great!

They are all lovely!
Geez, you guys are making me jealous with your painting skills!

2-ton: i think that looks good! what is it you're not happy with? i do recognize the feeling when you've pictured something one way and it turns out completely different - can be hard to let go of your imagined resutl and just be happy with what you got.

he4rty: thanks! yes, i really needed paisley brushes for this. of course, i think paisleys go well with everything, but they seemed essential for this.

chris f: you've started a trend ! thank you for sharing your technique like that, i've had fun with these.

erisian: thank you! i agree with you, i like the feeling of the top picture better, but it's hard to get the right colours when you're working from such a dark basic picture, so i like the colours best in the bottom one. i also like how i got the main motif to float out into the background in the bottom one.

odinbc: thank you - but i don't think we need much painting skills for these, the filters fake paint for us and then we just make backgrounds and try to blend the main motif into the background as nicely as possible.

There all really nice images!

what I don't like is that it's just too dark...what I need to do is find a picture or render that works better. I was dabbling with beautify on the render, and probably should have made my render less colorful, then I could have made my background less bright, too. I was going for a rather dull, bland grunge look. I also wanted to make the render look more integrated with the design, and not so much like it was just stuck on.

It's the daughter of a friend that we visited when we went to Nottingham. Mom already likes the original watercolor I did, I just used it because it was handy and on my desktop.

2-ton: my top one also got a bit too dark for the colours to look good - or at least to look like i wanted them to look. try thinking of it as good in another way instead of bad - because that's really what it is. and next time you try you will do it differently and get a different result.

Looks quite nice. Doing watercolour digitally is really hard... Mypaint's watercolour brush is decent, but it's not perfect and only useful for painting from scratch. It's a bit tricky trying to do it with effects alone.

What you want to pay attention to is the variation in lightness. Real water colour always has this sort of splotchy, runny quality, with the lightness of the colour varying in a splotchy way. If you also want to simulate real watercolour paper, you'll want a touch of graininess in there as well. If the colours are too clean and flat, it won't look authentic.

thanks for all the hints. Next time I will try to get it done as I envision it!

dd: good tips, thank you! i think i worry more about the decorativeness of the result than about making realistic watercolours, but if i get it to look more "real" i might like it even better .