pencil sketch over watercolor

Josh Carter is a graphic designer and software architect from Boulder, Colorado. Josh's design work includes photography, interactive application graphics, print design, and mobile phone themes. Below is his tutorial demonstrating a technique that combines the pencil sketch and watercolor filters from Snap Art 2. See more of his work in our Snap Art, Bokeh and Exposure case studies or on his website: joshcarter.com

tutorial

I've seen artists do a pencil sketch with a watercolor wash over it, and I was curious if I could reproduce the effect in Snap Art 2. I took the original photo and applied Watercolor with a medium brush and a fair amount of color variation. I then took the original photo again and applied Pencil Sketch with light coverage and a good amount of contrast. To overlay these, I set the Pencil Sketch layer to multiply mode over the Watercolor layer.

I felt at this point that the color needed some punch. I used Exposure 2 with a modified version of the Fuji Sensia preset to boost contrast and shift the color tone. I masked out the fish, however, because I wanted that to retain its green (oxidized copper) color. The final result is a lot more bold than your traditional "pencil and watercolor" image, both in tone and texture, but I felt it suited the bold texture of the stonework.

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