How I Paint a Digital Watercolor in Layers

My process for painting digital watercolors in Rebelle 3 software is very similar to how I paint with traditional watercolors, except that I make much use of layers. In this post I’ll show you how my digital process works with “Winter Sisters.”

Rummaging through old vacation photographs on my hard drive, I was drawn to a shot of Three Sisters Mountain. It depicts the mountain in late winter from a Canmore, AB, park where my wife and I like to snowshoe. The name refers to the mountain’s iconic profile: the peaks, when viewed from the north with a bit of snow covering them, look a bit like three sisters or nuns in white and black habits. My reference photo depicts only two of the sisters—Faith and Hope, or more prosaically, the Fat and Middle Sister—just beyond the shoulder of Grassi Mountain.

Contrasting colors and textures drew me to this image: brittle ochre grasses survive the winter in the foreground melting snow while the formidable blue-gray mountain looms in the distance. So, my first step was to drastically crop the reference photo to focus on just these contrasts. That explains the unusual vertical composition. 

Next, I extracted a limited color palette from the reference photo and from a winter landscape by Philip Jamison (b. 1925), a Pennsylvania watercolorist whose work I admire.

After sketching the major elements of the composition, I began painting from the background to the foreground. This slideshow records my progress through several working layers:

As you can see in the slideshow, the foreground is combination of two layers: a base layer of local color and another layer with details of the grasses, contour shadows, spattered highlights, and so on. What you did not see is that the final layers of the mountains and trees were also combinations of several layers: a base layer of local color (to establish basic contours and introduce underlying textures) and another layer or two of details (to emphasize some edges, add a glaze of color, dry brush more texture, draw in or erase details, and so on).

I worked on this painting off and on for two or three hours. I stopped often to stretch, refresh my perspective, anticipate and solve a new problem in the next bit, and so on. Usually I took a short break when I finished a working layer (that is, a base layer plus some detail layers).

I was very pleased with the final painting: it suggests the majesty of the mountain in relation to the surrounding landscape. I feel like the mountain is shown in its winter home.

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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