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Because Debi asked, here's a brief bit about how to get a Photoshop brush to mimic up a fair approximation of a watercolour piece. This'll mostly be of interest to Photoshop users - though the video may be neat to watch for those interested in seeing a blank canvas get filled with colour way too quickly.

I use a combination of self-designed brushes and custom ones I found wandering the barren cyberscapes of the Interthing. For this particular project, I used a brush developed by Nagel (Nagel?), though its a simple enough process that any Photoshop user can do it. First, I'll demonstrate how to create the brush and then I'll demonstrate in a video how I used the new brush to paint the background wash for my Thank You notes.

To create a brush in Photoshop, one first needs a black-and-white image that will be a single instance of the brush. Let's call this SW01 (shorthand for Seth's Watercolour 01). The image I used as the base for SW01 is pretty much exactly this:

You can save this image and open it in Photoshop to create the brush for yourself, if you like. The below image shows what this brush looks like all zoomed in and stuff.

Once the image is open in Photoshop, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset on your menu. As prompted, give it a name. Now, open a new document in Photoshop, select the Brush Tool, and open the Brush Palette. Under the Brush Presets heading of the Brush Palette, find the new preset you just made.

Now that you've selected the right brush, you can edit its details. Checkmark Shape Dynamics and set its variables to match the picture below. You'll notice that for size, I've set the control to Pen Pressure. Using a drawing tablet is essential, and while there is still some degree of functionality in using the mouse to paint with, it is really probably so impoverished a tool that its not worth creating this brush without access to a tablet. You'll note that the Angle Jitter is set high. This is to keep your strokes from looking to computer generated.

Next are the Scattering settings. Small amount of Scatter to help keep your painting from looking to regular.

Under Dual Brush, set your mode to Opacity and play around with your brushes till you find one that creates a good effect on your brush. I chose a somewhat speckled brush in this case, but I change this around on projects depending on my need. Feel free to test and experiment.

Lastly, checkmark Noise, Wet Edges, and Smoothing. These are the settings that will give your brush its liquid feel.

And the next lastly: click on the menu button in the top corner of your Brushes Palette to get the context sensitive menu and select New Brush Preset. Whatever you name this brush, that is where you will find on the Brush Presets the brush with this particular shape and settings.

And now, here is a demonstration of how I use this kind of brush. Key to this kind of painting is frequent tonal adjustments. When you have the Brush Tool selected, holding the ALT-key in Windows will briefly switch you over to the eyedropper tool with which you can quickly sample a new Foreground Colour (rather than going to the trouble to open the Colour Picker). So you'll notice me doing this frequently. As well, you can adjust your brush's Flow to suit your needs - the lower your flow on this brush, the more rough your stroke will be.

Photoshop Sample - Watercolour Brushes from The Dane on Vimeo.

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At work I've been putting together a number of tutorials detailing different ways to achieve a variety of visual goals using Photoshop CS2. I thought they were pretty snappy and would have found them useful when I was trying to figure out things like layer masks and adjustment layers, so I thought I'd try to port them over to some of the free video sites that are out there.

With little luck.

YouTube will not post video that is over ten minutes in length and most decent tutorials are going to hover around the ten-to-twenty minute mark. Further compounding the difficulty is screenRes. YouTube requires video at a miniscule 320x240. I had already shrunk my photoshop canvas from a sprawling 3000x1200 down to something like 1400x850 for initial recording and then resized the video for compatibility with 1024x768 screens. That works just fine. 320x240 does not. Nearly all detail is lost and it becomes very difficult to see what's going on.

So then I tried Google Video. It asks that you upload video at 640x480. And I saw hourlong videos available on-site. So that was encouraging. But then, after upload of my 25 minute test video, I checked to see how it looked and despite requiring 640x480, Google resized it to 320x240 anyway.

And double sigh.

Anyway, if you care to learn how to colour in line art in Photoshop, here's a twenty-five minute video in which I demonstrate how to colour the art I used in the masthead above.