Watercolor Art 2.0: Leveraging Digital Tools for Optimal Results

As you may know, I am an online watercolor teacher, coach, blogger, and YouTuber. Watercolor is my passion, because I love getting results for my students. However, there was a time when I considered being a Procreate teacher. If you're not familiar with this app, it is one of the premier tools for digital artists as I write this post, and has been for quite a while.

I absolutely love the magic of creating art on my iPad with the Apple Pencil. It is just a dream. Add a little fun animation here and there, and it's pure coolness! However, I already get too much screen time. Running a creative business involves a lot of back end computer work, and I needed a more organic activity to help ground me. Enter watercolor painting.

I love that I can paint just about anything with watercolors.

The fact that watercolor painting literally brought me out of a horrible panic attack during the beginning of the shut down in 2020, has made me a loyal fan of this medium. Not to mention the incredible beauty that can be achieved with them!

It's funny because nowadays, I paint everything I can get my hands on. I have watercolor icons for a sales page on my website, I paint images for my homepage and social media accounts, and I use watercolors for everything from abstract art, to fashion illustration, landscapes, portraits, and the list goes on. Watercolors just make everything look more beautiful.

Watercolors make everything look for beautiful…

I even use watercolors to paint my surface designs. If you don't know what surface design is, it's the act of creating art for fabrics, wallpapers, stationary, home decor, and anything else art is printed on. However, if I want to get that art printed successfully, it needs to be brought into a digital form. Why? Great question!

Photographs and scans of paintings can be messy. They can look dull, dark, and dingy. Not the best start to creating inspiring products, right? But why products? Another great question! It's really important to me that my heart is purposeful. I want it to have meaning and I want others to be able to use it in a way that fits in with your every day life. That's why I love the idea of having my art on products. I want people to be inspired and to them bring joy. It’s been said that a room filled with art, even if it's printed on an object, is a happy room.

Learning how to make watercolors printable has been such an adventure!

So I sought to learn how to use digital tools and not only do I know how to use the Procreate app for the iPad, but I also learned how use Adobe Illustrator to create seamless repeats (for fabrics and wallpapers) and vectors (enlargable to any size). But that’s a story for another time.

The truth is that I want to primarily do analog, or non-digital art for my wellbeing. The sounds of the brush gliding on the paper as the paint starts to work is sheer magic. But I could argue that using digital tools when it helps me save time, energy, and do things I can’t otherwise, inherently contributes to my wellbeing in completely different ways. Digital tools make my work scalable and expand my options considerably.

Watercolor painting will always be my go-to, but digital tools make my work scalable and expand my options considerably.

I’m about to open a new P.O.D. shop as I’m writing this post, and I wouldn’t have clear, clean, and crisp looking art to fill it without the Procreate app. There are also lots of other apps you can use to enhance your art, like Adobe Fresco, Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Designer, just to name a few. Each artist has a unique process that will require different kinds of tools, because each one has different sorts of features that fill different requirements. So which tools you use will depend what your end goal is.

I keep my set up as simple as possible, so I’ll never use tools I don’t actually need. This comes from someone who does have a terrible case of shiny object syndrome, and tries all the new apps just to see how they work. But I also still use an iPhone to film with, and a simple quality travel microphone to record, to be able to better streamline my workflow. I also still use iMovie for editing my videos, which makes professional editors cringe with it’s basic-ness. So yes, I may chase the new toys for a bit, but I'll always go back to what I only absolutely need.

Still wondering whether to do regular watercolor art or add some digital tools?

If you're not going to be printing your art, selling in a POD shop, or creating patterns with your art, then you probably don't need them. However, if you do you want more options to showcase and learn how to enhance your art, digital tools are a must.

Curious about how this works? I’m no digital pro, but I did make a video about a mini collection that I enhanced using the Procreate app. Feel free to click on the video to watch it now, and see if digitizing is for you.

I’d love to know what you decide, think, or believe, about digital along with watercolors. Or are you a watercolor purist? Share your perspective and what you’re using in your own art practice in the comments below! :-)