Painting an autumn landscape in watercolor with Dania Garcia
Table of contents
- Choosing colors to paint with
- Selecting a reference photo
- Drawing an accurate outline
- Accurately mixing the colors from a reference photo
- Tonal value study
- Simplifying a reference photo
- Working with a limited palette
- Applying artistic styles to a photo for inspiration
- The finished painting
- About ArtistAssistApp
Dania Garcia presents a walkthrough of the ArtistAssistApp, showing how it streamlined her watercolor workflow. She demonstrates importing a reference, setting a custom 12-color palette, generating contours for tracing, using the color picker to get precise mixing recipes for colors sampled from a reference image, analyzing tonal values, simplifying detail, and testing limited palette previews. Dania's video covers these tools and how to adapt them for different subjects.
Choosing colors to paint with
Dania begins with the Color set tab, where users add the palette they work with: choose art medium (watercolor, gouache, oil, etc.), brands, and colors. She selects watercolor and locates her brand among many brands available in the app. Because she uses a custom 12-color palette, she manually adds those 12 pans to her color set.
Learn more about creating and managing color sets in this tutorial.
Selecting a reference photo
She uploads the reference image she wants to paint on the Photo tab.
Drawing an accurate outline
Before painting, she uses the Outline feature to generate a drawing (stroke) from the photo that can be printed or traced. She notes two modes — a Quick mode and a Quality mode with more detail — and explains that contouring helps artists who are less confident to draw directly from photos.
Learn more about converting a photo into an outline for tracing in this tutorial.
Accurately mixing the colors from a reference photo
She begins drawing from that contour and uses the Color picker to choose mixes for different areas. Dania praises the app's intuitive workflows for producing combinations closely matched to the reference.
She demonstrates clicking on sections of the reference so the app returns mix recipes based on the chosen palette: color combinations, proportions, and alternative options. Dania highlights that this is especially valuable for artists still learning color mixing, and she saves useful combinations to the Palette for later use.
Learn more about mixing colors from photos in this tutorial.
Tonal value study
Dania explains the importance of tonal balance in capturing light and shadow and shows how the app's tonal-values guidance helps create contrast and depth. She adds a grayscale preview of her finished watercolor to demonstrate that the tonal guide preserved depth and contrast even without color.
Learn more about tonal values and contrast in this tutorial.
Simplifying a reference photo
Next, she covers Simplified, a tool that reduces detail so artists can focus on larger shapes and proportions. Users can choose the amount of simplification from subtle to heavy; Dania emphasizes its usefulness for planning and avoiding overworking a watercolor.
Learn how to simplify photos by smoothing out details in this tutorial.
Working with a limited palette
She then explores Limited palette previews: selecting one, two, three, or more colors to see a preview of how a painting will read if restricted to those hues. This preview helps plan color-restricted approaches and generate creative ideas.
Learn more about limited palettes in this tutorial.
Applying artistic styles to a photo for inspiration
Dania also mentions a playful feature that applies different artist-style conversions to the reference image, useful for experimentation or inspiration.
Learn more about image style transfer in this tutorial.
The finished painting
Dania shows the completed watercolor made using the app's features and remarks on how many helpful tools are packed into the app.
About ArtistAssistApp
ArtistAssistApp, also known as Artist Assist App, is a web app for artists to accurately mix any color from a photo, analyze tonal values, turn a photo into an outline, draw with the grid method, paint with a limited palette, simplify a photo, remove the background from an image, compare photos pairwise, and more.
Try it now for free at https://app.artistassistapp.com to improve your painting and drawing skills and create stunning artworks.