Ummm… I LOVE watercolour painting. When Dan and I visited the Moma in NYC, I could have stared at the watercolours for DAYS. LOVE. LOVE. LOVE them. But I’ve never had a desire or the ability to create them. At least I’ve never had a desire to create them and put them anywhere in my home. So today, I’m going to show you what to do when you’re too chicken to paint watercolour! And the BEST APP for faking it, until you make it!
I did some searching around for ‘art’ apps that would take our family photos and turn them into works of art. That’s when I discovered Waterlogue. (And no, this is not a sponsored post!)
Look at this! Crazy town, I tell ya! I’m hooked. I’m done. Stick a fork in me. This is our Instagram profile pic….but WATERCOLOUR!
For $4, I now have a tool on my phone that allows me to customize my photos into wondrous works of one of a kind art.
I did learn a few things along the way, however.
- Photos that are very busy don’t really translate well (think pictures of a bunch of sea rocks or grass or something… too visually busy)
- Photos that have dark backgrounds – like say, taken in an Irish pub or on a deck at night – also don’t translate well
See? I wanted to do this candid shot of us on our wedding day – but the colours in the background just made it seem too heavy for a real watercolour…Also, we have no faces. That’s sorta creepy. Sorry… 😛
- You’ll spend hours ‘watercolouring’ ALL THE THINGS
- Cityscapes and simple nature shots look amazing
- I really want to get a shot of the front of our house in the spring and do a watercolour of that for our foyer
I dug around in our crawl space (use what you’ve got folks!) and I found a trio frame that was a bit beat up – but perfect for what I wanted to do. I painted it a light grey and ordered my three 4×6 prints online.
These are the ones I chose.
For the driftwood shot, I just used the ‘vibrant’ setting. It’s the first one that comes up in the app.
For this pic of NYC, I used the ‘It’s Technical’ setting, which I found emphasized the lines in the buildings a bit more. In fact, it adds super light ‘grid lines’ to the whole painting.
For this pic of Buddy, I wanted to show more of the shadows around his body in the snow, so I chose the ‘vibrant’ setting and then scrolled over and selected ‘darkest’ on the light meter. That brings out more of the greys and blacks found within the shot.
Here’s one shot of the final product. It’s a bit a sneak peek into our newly redone sunroom.
I’m working on a post about all the new updates and it won’t be out until next week because our room is going to be featured in the next edition of The Coast’s Homes Halifax publication!! Whaaaa!?!!? So ya. Just sit tight – we’ll show you the full shebang as soon as we can. 🙂
Here are other posts you’ll love
This post contains affiliate links for your convenience. Here is our privacy and disclosure policy.
