Do you remember playing with drippy, flowey, transparent watercolor paint when you were a kid?
Watercolors are funny paints, they’re these little rock solid pans of pigment all lined up in a box. They don’t look like much at first.
But once you swab those little pots with your big, wet, soppy paintbrush, the whole game changes. The colors float and slide and ooze around the page. They look so ethereal and even improvisational. It’s hard to control where the paint goes, but that’s part of the appeal.
Though honesty, it’s not much of an appeal to me, someone who has little natural ability to draw. Throw in a wet piece of paper and a drippy brush and things just go downhill from there.
I still love that softly shaded and blended look that watercolors have so over the years I’ve played around with (and had moderate success with) watercolor pencils, watercolor crayons, and even watercolor leaves (basically sheets of watercolor pigment you pick up with a damp brush). Though I’m far away from watercolor painting in the traditional sense, the effect is close enough for me.
But now I have a new watercolor tool in my paintbox and man oh man is it fantastic! And not a sloppy brush or dripping soggy paper to be found.
It’s an app called Waterlogue.
If you love the look of watercolor, you will absolutely love this app.
(and I swear this is a totally objective recommendation, I don’t get any kind of incentive or kickback or anything from it, I just love it and have so much fun with it and want to let you know)
Here’s an example of a before-and-after photo transformation. The original photo here is completely unedited – it’s straight out of my iPad camera (kind of dark and ugly, nothing really special about this photo except our sweet cat who rarely poses for pictures):
After opening the Waterlogue app, I pull in the photo from my camera roll and the app gets to work. That’s when the magic happens right before your eyes.
You’ll see the screen turn to a white canvas, then a pencil drawing of your photo appears bit by bit. Once the picture is sketched, it starts to paint (and they make it look oh-so easy!), and it finishes with this:
Really neat, huh?
Once the initial paining is finished, you can apply different effects to the image, much like Instagram or other photo editing programs. Here are a variety of effects I’ve used on different photos. All of the original photos are unedited (so they're far from stellar, but I wanted to show you what you can start with and still have remarkable results), followed by the Waterlogue version:
Hard to beat that effect, don’t you think? It makes watercoloring look easy without a single drip or smudge!
The Waterlogue App is available through the App Store and is compatible with the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.