Watercolor Painting with GMX-PhotoPainter for Mac

Magically transform digital photos into artistic paintings. Just like real paintings, GMX paintings are composed of many overlapped brushstrokes. You have the freedom to choose and combine your own settings, but at the same time will guide the process of painting by automatically choosing the colors and directions of the brushstroke. Effects include Oil paints, pen and ink, crayons and watercolors.

Original Image:

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to turn a great landscape into watercolor painting using GMX-PhotoPainter for Mac:

First steps
Original URL: www.flickr.com/photos/33088287@N00/1579426246/

Step 1: Open the original image

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Step 2: Select Watercolor Style

In the toolbar you will find various styles: Watercolor, oilpainting, crayon, etc.

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Once you’ve selected the Watercolor Style the toolbar will show the available styles, choose the
one named “very wet – med.size”:

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Step 3: Change the style settings

In order to cover the whole image quickly, the first brushstrokes should be of large size. To accomplish this, set the width and length in the middle of it’s ranges. In this example I chose 46 and 232 respectively.

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Color Variation

Due to the nature of the original image, I lowered the color variation in the brushstrokes. Large color variations will result in the lost of the smooth gradients of the original image.

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Step 4: Start Painting!

After those preliminars steps is time to apply some brushstrokes.
With the “Autosketch” tool selected, drag the pointing device over the original image.

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Automatically Applying the Brushstrokes

During the early stages of your painting you can choose to paint manually, or you can let GMX-PhotoPainter do it for you:

A. Choose the Pattern Tool

The pattern tool is best to quickly cover the image.

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B. Select the option: Apply All

The following sheet will popup:

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This is a result after 4000 steps. As you can see, while it have a painterly look, it doesn’t show any detail.

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Step 5: Revealing the Details

It’s moment to start working in the details. To do so, progressively diminish the brush size. The brush size is determined by the Width and Length of the brush.

Below are the settings I used in this first stage. Later I’ll use even smaller brushes to paint some parts with more detail.

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A note about Wacom Tablets

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GMX-PhotoPainter takes full advantage of the Wacom Tablets. The Pen Pressure will modify:

Transparency: More pressure will lead in more opaque strokes
Width
Length

Thus, passing the pen over the borders with little pressure will help to reveal the fine details.
The more pressure you apply, the fastest and coarse brushstrokes you’ll obtain.

Below is the result. It looks better, but as you can see it still lack details. In the following stages I’ll use smaller and smaller brushes, with special emphasis in the sharp areas like the horizon and black contours of the trees.

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The next step was painted with the following settings:

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As you can see the painting is almost finished, but still have some details, as you can see in the following image which is at 100% scale:
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To finish the painting I just retouched the imperfections using the freehand tool:

The width of the “band” that uses the freehand painting is determined by the “Size” control. You’ll find it at the bottom and center of the main screen.

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As above: The Wacom Tablet was useful in this step because it gives you more precision and control over the brushstrokes.

Finished Painting.

Click to see at 100% scale.

Detail of the finished painting:

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More detail of the finished painting:

First steps

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