Digital Painting Tools and Tutorials

Welcome to my Digital Watercolor & Mixed-Media Workshop. You have come to the right place if you are interested in painting digitally!

What this site is about

This site is primarily aimed at digital watercolor painting using Photoshop. Over several years I have developed a complete painting system which includes a full set of Photoshop brushes, erasers and blenders as well as the papers or canvas; actions and scripts; color swatches and styles. I have also included tutorials and articles which explain in detail and step by step how to use these tools and techniques to produce highly realistic watercolor and mixed media paintings.

Digital v. Traditional

If you are mainly interested in traditional painting, you will find that digital painting is an extremely useful stepping-stone, just as digital photography is a useful learning tool for film photography. Because the techniques of digital and traditional watercolor painting are analogous, the rapid progress that can be achieved with digital can be transferred to your traditional painting.

This is a useful bonus of digital, but this is not to say that digital is inferior to traditional. There are some areas in which traditional wins out and others where digital wins out: for example, there are very powerful techniques in digital painting that are simply not available to traditional painting.

Why not both?

From my own experience I would say that each benefits from the other. If you mainly want to paint digitally then I would still recommend that you play around with paint and paper because this will inform and enrich your digital painting; and, as I have already mentioned, painting digitally will help your tradional painting to move forwards in leaps and bounds! They are both tremendous fun, and there is no reason to pick one over the other.

Getting started

There is plenty of information here to get you started: you will find a number of Articles that I have tried to make as useful and informative as possible; and I have included a set of Tutorials to show you in detail how to paint digitally using the Tools available here. Use the above menu to explore this online Digital Watercolor Workshop.

There are also more tips and tricks on Facebook/PaintingDigitally. If you would like to learn from others or discuss anything related to digital painting, why don't you join the PaintingDigitally Facebook group?

All the resources you need are here:

So I hope you'll give digital watercolor painting a go. You won't regret it!

Have fun!

pic of Robert Ardill