[ToastyKen]

I like Painter's water tool.. It allows me to blend two patches of color together smoothly and evenly, creating as big or as little a gradient as I want at the border.

In photoshop, the blur tool only blurs in place, and you don't have too much control over the gradualness of the gradient.. and the smudge tool is too focused on moving all the paint over, instead of just leaving the paint that's there in place and sort of fingerpaintingish some paint over.

I don't know if I've explained myself very well, but basically, I was wondering how to get an effect like Painter's "Just Add Water" tool in Photoshop, as I haven't been able to duplicate that effect with the blur and smudge tools.

Basically, I want to do what's explained in this tutorial in Photoshop. Any ideas?

[Socar MYLES]

There's a tutorial on...whose site is it, now? Don Seegmiller's, I think. And, silly me, I don't remember the URL. But the essence of what he had to say was this: If you're blending two fields of colour, then use crosswise strokes with the Smudge tool across both fields where they come together. You'll end up with a zigzaggy-looking effect, which you can then smooth out with vertical strokes/diagonal strokes/the blur tool/et cetera. That'll get you a nice, painterly effect, I'm told.

Myself, I never use the Smudge or Blur tools--I get the blended effect by either airbrushing over one colour with the other, paintbrushing over it with the paintbrush set at less than 100% transparency, or by having one colour on a separate layer from the other, then using the Eraser tool. The Eraser works well, because it doesn't erase completely if you use light strokes (assuming you've got a Wacom pen), and you get a nice raggly edge.

Anyway, hope that helps.

[ToastyKen]

Thanks, Socar. That's pretty much what I suspected. I actually don't really mind, since I like the brushed look better, actually.