Textures in "The Major's Storehouse"

"The Major's Storehouse"

Digital watercolor paintings feature many (apparent) textures, some created by processes that emulate traditional painting and others made in ways unique to digital painting. In this post, I’ll illustrate both kinds with “The Major’s Storehouse.”

In an earlier post, “Textures in Watercolor Painting,” I compared how watercolorists create texture in traditional paintings with some techniques I use to produce (apparent) texture in digital watercolor painting. Each section of “The Major’s Storehouse”—the sky, building, foreground field, and rocks—incorporates a few of those techniques. For this painting I used digital Watercolor and Ink brushes in Rebelle 3 software, which does a great job of emulating water-based media. You might adapt these techniques to other digital painting programs.

The Composition and Painting Process

My painting is based very loosely on reference photos I made at Fortress of Louisbourg National Historical Site on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in October 2018. The Fortress is a wonderful reconstruction from the 1960’s of portions of an imposing fortified city of New France as it appeared in the mid-eighteenth century.

The building in the painting is accurate to the original, one of two storehouses in the De la Vallière home complex. The owner, Major Michele Leneuf De la Vallière (1708-1787), was the son of a former governor of Acadia (now, Nova Scotia). The Major distinguished himself as a naval officer protecting French Newfoundland and Isle Royale (now, Cape Breton Island) from English privateers. From the size and location of this storehouse, he must have been very active in maritime commerce, as well. Being built into a hillside, the building has ground-level entrances on the first and second stories. Another entrance to the upper floor is located high on the north wall that faces the town’s harbor; the extended beam would support a system of pulleys to raise heavy loads to that entrance. The thick rubble masonry or random fieldstone exterior walls with small windows and the hipped roof with gabled dormers are typical of Louisbourg architecture, though dormers usually were located much lower on the roof, just above the sill of the outer walls.

With apologies to Major De la Vallière, I decided to make the surrounding landscape much scruffier that it really is. For his manicured yard, I substituted some boulders and wild grasses I photographed across town. Their textures compliment the beautiful textures in the storehouse and the wild, North Atlantic sky in the background.

I tend to paint the sky, foreground, and focal point in a digital watercolor landscape in that order and as separate sections. This seems to help me balance values. Generally I paint the sky in one layer, but paint the other sections, such as the foreground (in this image, grassy field and rocks) and focal point (the buildings), in several layers—a base layer and various detail layers—that are blended to produce the final image.

Textures in the Sky

I start a landscape painting with the sky for two reasons: it establishes values for the rest of the painting and, to be completely honest, I’m always afraid I'll mess this part up. So, let me admit, this is the second sky I painted for “The Major’s Storehouse.” The first sky was not too great; I waited 24 hours to delete it and try this one, which I liked enough to continue the painting.

To a pre-wetted, smooth-textured canvas (I was using Hot Pressed paper at this point), I applied wet washes of several blues and a pale warm yellow. Then I changed the brush to the Clean Brush setting in Rebelle. This wonderful, odd setting does not emulate any process I know in traditional watercolor painting, but the product is quite traditional. Basically, on this setting the digital watercolor brush starts “clean” (i.e., with no loaded color but only the artist's chosen ratio of water to pigment), then it samples the hue already present where it first touches the canvas and proceeds to paint and blend with it. The effect is hard to describe. When you touch a place that has no hue, it is like adding water to that spot. But if you touch a place that has color, it feels like you’re pushing some watercolor pigment around and adjusting its fluidity as you go. A Clean Brush can be used on wet or dry color, but here I use it on the wet colors to smooth away distracting edges in the dark sky and shape the yellow into wispy, blowing cloud shapes.

Textures in the Field

The textures in the field involve the blending of three layers, as shown here in a detail from the lower right corner of the composition:

Before I painted the field layers, I created a masking layer for the rocks. Then, in the first layer shown above, I painted a loose wash of colors over the field area. While they were still wet, I shaped and blended these colors a bit using the Clean Brush setting described above. 

For the second layer, I duplicated the first layer and set this new layer to the Color Burn blend mode at 25% opacity. [Now, according to Wikipedia, “The Color Burn mode divides the inverted bottom layer by the top layer, and then inverts the result.” I have no idea what that means. But without changing the colors, it really darkens everything. That’s why I lower the opacity to 25%.] Then I erased bits of the copy layer using various textured erasers and splat brushes set to the erase mode. The erased areas appear as lighter texture. As you can see above, I erased more and larger areas near the foreground. (Note: the second layer above is shown in Normal blend mode so you can see what I did. In Color Blend mode the effect is very, very subtle.)

The third layer was a new painting layer for details, with the blend mode set to Soft Light at 100% opacity. On this layer, I just went crazy. I carefully brushed or splattered dark colors over some light areas (of the first two layers), light colors over some dark areas, darker colors over dark, lighter colors over light—just whatever looked good to me. I always painted on various heavily textured canvases with organic, rough textures. Again: anything went at this stage. When a texture looked too obvious or too much, I softened it with textured erasers and textured brushes set to eraser mode. (Note: once again the third layer above is shown in Normal blend mode so you can see what I did.)

Finally, I merged two layers at a time, from the top down. That is, I merged the top two detail layers, and then merged that detail layer with the base layer. (For some reason, if you merge all three layers at once, or merge from the bottom up, you get some wonky changes to the appearance of the painting.)

Textures in the Rocks

The rocks textures are more straightforward; they involve just two layers in Normal blend:

Before I painted these layers, I created a stencil from the rock masking layer. In effect, this protected the field area and allowed me to paint the rocks in loose strokes. The first layer shown above has those loose washes of base colors over a smooth canvas; they are blended a bit with the Clean Brush. For the second layer, I dabbed and spattered paint over on a variety of textured canvases. Finally, I drew ragged crevice lines with the Wood Ink brush. Various edges of these textures were softened with textured erasers.

Textures in the Storehouse

The base layer was painted in the same way as the base layers of the field and the rocks.

Before I painted the second layer, which has the primary textures of the fieldstone walls, I created a new textured canvas from a photograph of a rough rock wall and reduced this canvas to the smallest size. Then I dabbed very wet paint over this new canvas and let the texture in the canvas do some of the work of forming the rock shapes. I made adjustments with various erasers.

On the third layer I painted the windows and doors, highlighted a few mortared crevices in the wall, strengthened a few rock shapes, and added shadows. I usually paint windows, doors, and shadows on a new layer like this because I can paint them quite freely and then erase back to suitable edges.

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Thanks for reading!

I hope that you enjoyed this post and that it inspires you to enjoy digital painting. If you find this post helpful, please share it with your friends. And please send me your insights on digital painting and suggestions for Digital Paint Spot.

Bob Kruschwitz