Pictorial techniques and watercolor

Sketch for simulating some effects of the watercolor technique performed in The Gimp.

Over the last few months I have been involved in several projects and ideas, mainly the methods and paradigms of digital painting. So far I've filled pages and pages of text and notes, sometimes a little mismatched, sometimes with commonalities, but the research work keeps getting more and more interesting and provocative.

I am personally interested in the methods of emulating many pictorial techniques to gain greater knowledge of the digital medium in the sense of proposing traditional things and implementing the traditional in digital with something that comes from this medium.

Test brushstrokes with various types of brushes and dynamics for wet painting.

The idea was to study traditional pictorial techniques and implement this in the digital field and using free tools. But in the end I realized that we can think in a broader way, that is, it is better to study the techniques in a way that we make use of the digital medium more freely and regardless of the origin of the software and operating systems.

An important issue linked to these questions is the fact of painting mimics or the instruments and presets that try to emulate a certain type of painting or effect. After much thought on the subject, I came to the conclusion that the mimics of painting in themselves are neither good nor bad, they depend on the creative use that each one of us makes of them. However, the mimics of painting deprive the artist of a better interaction with the digital medium and the basic instruments of digital painting.

I personally believe that working directly on the tools and building your own ways of painting is the best solution for the path of an illustrator or artist in digital media.

Mixture of dry and wet watercolor technique in digital media with a support similar to Ingres paper, created in Gimp.

In a natural and real process of painting or drawing, we are used to thinking and treating the pictorial medium according to its own and natural schemes, that is, they are linked in some way to traditional means and techniques of treatment, for example, the pencil and the stump and their relationships with the support used. I have already mentioned in the past, but much of the aspect that we understand about the appearance of certain pictorial techniques are largely linked to their supports and another part due to the instrument itself, that is, the relationship of the pencil or certain ink with a type of paper , there is no trace of graphite without thinking about the relationship of friction with the paper. So, imagine drawing on the glass with a pencil, in the first place the line will have difficulty being fixed and in the second place it is likely that it will not be anything like the aspect that we consider the usual.

Studying some watercolor effects in digital media and how to propose them in a simple and practical way, test done in Gimp.

In this sense, I believe that it is more important to understand well the concepts of each technique and thus propose an equivalent with something else that originates in the digital environment, using ready-made mimics we will be shortening many processes but at the same time producing a certain homogenization in aspects of this or that technique and a large part of learning is lost, which could be useful to innovate or improvise our style.