I was so excited to play with this digital scrapbooking bundle by Studio Basic and Traci Reed, “Wild Thing Bundle”. It is full of warm golds and natural tones, doodled delights, brushes, texture and so much more. I decided to create something out of my comfort zone and created this layout below.
When I uploaded it, some of my digiscrap buddies asked me the technique to turn a photo into a watercolor painting. So, I thought I’d share the technique here in this blog (I’m using Photoshop CS6).
Step 1 : Open a new file of 3600 x 3600 pixel at 300 dpi.
Use treed-wildthing-pp8 as the background of the layout.
Step 2 : Drag the photo into the layout. Make a copy of it and make the original photo invisible.
Step 3 : Select original photo copy. Go to Filter > Stylize > Find Edges.
Step 4 : Add Layer Mask.
Step 5 : Click Eraser Tool. Choose a brush with watercolor effect (for example : SS Waterstains. If you don’t have it, you will need to download the water paint brush for free in Stephanie Shimerdla Brushes.). Start erasing through all 4 sides of the photo (make sure you erase on the mask layer, not the photo itself). Be careful not to make hard lines at the border of the photo so the photo will blend seamlessly with the background layer.
Step 6 : Copy the original photo and move it to the top.
Step 7 : Select the layer and change the blending mode from Normal to Hard Light.
Step 8 : Add Layer Mask and click Eraser Tool. Choose a brush with watercolor effect again. Start erasing the photo just like previous layer.
The final result should look like this :
Step 9 : Add some more brushes and elements from the kit and voila…. The layout is done!
So, you see it’s not too hard to transform an ordinary photo into a watercolor painting. Why don’t you give it and try and play around with the artist inside you. Good luck!
About the Author: Nadia lives in Indonesia and happily balances her life by being a wife, a mother of three, an English teacher and obviously, a digital scrapbooking addict and a chocoholic. She considered herself as the story teller and memory keeper of her family and her scrapbooking goals in 2015 are to be more of a chronological scrapper by doing monthly spreads and to print them at the end of the year.