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Creating a Watercolor Painting Effect in After Effects

by Laura Hawk

In this series of After Effects tutorials, we will talk about the steps we take to create this watercolor painting effect project. Software required: After Effects CS6.

What you'll learn

In this series of After Effects tutorials, we will talk about the steps we take to create this watercolor painting effect project. We begin by using a simple masking technique to reveal the text and drawings that interact with our watercolor paintings. We talk about some of the more technical and tricky aspects of getting this write-on effect looking perfect and all throughout the course, we implement the technique in new and different ways. We also go over how to combine masking techniques with our very own custom luma mattes to create a painterly effect that we apply to our watercolor images. Once we have a couple different variations of our watercolors, we talk about other effects we can apply to the base watercolor effect to change its color size and shape. This makes it feel like we have more unique paint effects, when in reality there are only a few. This is going to save you time without compromising the originality of your work. We move on by compositing all of our effects together and then we add a camera which we animate throughout the scene. We talk about some ways to get your camera's animation to feel much smoother than using the default keyframe interpolation types and how to troubleshoot when your camera movement is having issues. Software required: After Effects CS6.

About the author

Laura is a passionate visual effects and motion graphics author at Pluralsight. Ever since her first exposure to After Effects in college, Laura has had an eternal drive to learn more about motion graphics, and teach others what she has discovered. Laura began working at Digital-Tutors (now a Pluralsight company) as a motion graphics artist, creating visually-appealing advertisements and informative art for the site. Throughout her time at Digital-Tutors, Laura contributed greatly to both the ... more

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