Hello, everybody! I've tried to emulate watercolors with Krita and this is the result I've got with pixel and deform brush:


Does anyone have any suggestion to increase the realism (texturing apart)?
With the actual brush engine is it possible to make a brush with a darker and crisper border and with the color fading away at the center?

Thanks for the viewport rotation! I've tested this feature today and it works really smooth. Now I've to wait for the mixing brush reactivation to touch the paradise... Keep up the good work Krita team!

With the actual brush engine is it possible to make a brush with a darker and crisper border and with the color fading away at the center?

The current brush engine (softbrush) allows you to have color fading away from the center (just invert the curve). About the crisper border, I don't know if it has that feature, but it's very easy to add if you need it.

Now I've to wait for the mixing brush reactivation to touch the paradise...

Is it enough if the brush simply mixes colors and nothing more?.
Is it ok if it is slightly slower than the default brush?.
Do you need the brush to do some other special thing?.

Pentalis wrote:

With the actual brush engine is it possible to make a brush with a darker and crisper border and with the color fading away at the center?

The current brush engine (softbrush) allows you to have color fading away from the center (just invert the curve). About the crisper border, I don't know if it has that feature, but it's very easy to add if you need it.

Practically, in order to emulate watercolors, I should obtain the following effect in some manner:


Same effect applied to a different brush tip:

Inverting the "softness" curve of soft brush I've got a darker border, but ,sadly, with the actual parametric brush tip obtaining a very jagged border seems impossible (with the jitter movement too).

Now I've to wait for the mixing brush reactivation to touch the paradise...

Is it enough if the brush simply mixes colors and nothing more?.
Is it ok if it is slightly slower than the default brush?.
Do you need the brush to do some other special thing?.

IMHO the mixing brush behavior should be influenced by three simple options:

blending - how much the brush color is altered by the canvas color (strength of blending)
dilution - how much color is thinned/blurred by the water
persistence - length of blended color trailing

No problem if the brush is slightly slower than the default brush, but changing the shape of the brush tip in many different ways is absolutely necessary.

Thanks for the attention, Pentalis. I'm really grateful!

The traditional way to emulate the dark border effect seems to be a high-pass filter over the stroke -- that's what Photoshop is said to do. A good starting point is http://www.levien.com/gimp/brush-arch.html.

In Krita 1.6, we had a very accurate watercolor simulation that included extra color channels and water diffusion, based on Raph Levien's Wet Dreams prototype, and there was also the begin of an implementation of the Wet and Sticky model (following Tunde Cockshott's Phd thesis).

We did run into some problems, so these experiments haven't been ported over, but it would still be interesting to achieve effects like this.

This is the best watercolor simulation I know in the digital world:
(and Adobe has bought the algorithm using license for his future software )
http://visgraph.cse.ust.hk/MoXi/

Before switching to digital painting, I was a watercolorist; so every time I see the demos of this software, I almost cry of happiness. Really, a similar implementation in a foss software would be a dream...

But for the moment I'll be content with faking the effect in some manner...

Tom van Laerhoven's work is very interesting as well: http://research.edm.uhasselt.be/~tvanla ... /#Research -- but I cannot find his videos anymore.

Has anyone ever created presets for Krita? I love watercolor painting but haven't been able to make brushes that are satisfactory. What are the steps to create this effect?