AI Watercolor Portrait From a Photo

The Watercolor style paints your photo as a loose watercolor on cold-pressed cotton paper. Everything is made of transparent washes: pigment settles into the tooth of the paper and granulates there, wet colour runs into wet colour so one shape bleeds into the next, and a crisp edge appears only where a wash was left to dry against itself. Behind the subject, two or three soft colours — a dusty blue-green, a muted rose, a warm ochre — go down while the paper is still wet, so the background blooms and runs rather than filling evenly, and a little bare paper is left breathing at the corners.

It is the quietest of the twelve styles and the one that behaves least like the others, which it can be because each style is a separately written prompt rather than one filter wearing twelve names. There is no crown, no armour and no invented setting: a person keeps the clothes they were photographed in, and a pet keeps its own body and its own pose. The handling of the paint is the whole of the decoration, which is why it is the style suggested for a memorial portrait and the one people choose when they want something that can hang in a hallway without announcing itself.

What is kept and what changes. Kept: the exact face — eyes, nose, mouth, proportions, skin tone, hair colour and hair length — a pet's species, breed and markings, the expression, and the person's own contemporary clothes. Reinterpreted: the edges, which dissolve into the background wash instead of stopping at a border; the modelling of skin and fur, rebuilt out of thin overlapping washes with the paper showing through rather than out of opaque paint; and the background, which becomes a bloom of colour rather than a place you could name.

Coats and fabrics take a wash differently, and it is worth knowing which way round before you upload. Long, soft or double coats — a retriever's feathering, a Persian cat's ruff, a spaniel's ears — are what the medium is best at, because a wet-in-wet bleed is already the shape of soft fur. A knitted jumper, a linen shirt or loose hair behave the same way. Fine hard-edged detail is the thing to watch: washes describe it with a few confident dry-brush marks rather than drawing it line by line, so a thin chain, wire-framed glasses, a printed logo or a tightly patterned fabric come back suggested rather than reproduced. Freckles, a white chest patch and a folded ear survive perfectly well, because those are shapes rather than lines.

Best photographs for a Watercolor portrait: evenly lit, head-and-shoulders or head-to-chest, with the subject clearly separated from whatever is behind it. A slightly soft or slightly low-contrast photo is no obstacle here, which is why this is the style we suggest for an old phone picture of a pet who has died. What fights the style is a dark, heavily backlit photo, or a busy background pressed right up against the subject: transparent washes have nothing opaque to cut a shape back out with, so the two tend to run together. The photo is centre-cropped to 4:5 before anything is painted, so keep the subject near the middle of an upright frame.

On canvas the medium travels better than it sounds as though it should. A gallery canvas is stretched over a wooden frame, so 49 mm of picture on each edge folds around the sides; rather than printing a white border, the print file mirrors the outer band of the painting around every edge, and on this style that band is mostly open wash and bare paper, so the sides continue as colour instead of cutting through the subject. At 20×25 cm the blooms read as one soft field of colour. At 40×50 cm the separate washes start to come apart. At 60×75 cm the granulation and the dry-brush marks are individually visible, and the weave of the canvas stands in for the tooth of the paper.

What this page covers

The paper is the highlight — It is the only style page whose lightest value is not paint at all: transparent watercolor reserves the white of the cotton paper instead of adding an opaque white over the top, so every highlight here is a piece of paper that was left alone rather than a mark that was made.

Where the edges go — It explains the one thing this medium does that no other style on the site does, which is to let the shoulders and the outer contour bleed into the background wash rather than end at a border, with a crisp edge appearing only where one wash was left to dry against another.

Which coats and fabrics suit a wash — It says which textures the washes flatter and which they only suggest: long and double coats, loose hair, knitted wool and linen are what wet-in-wet bleeding is best at, while a thin chain, wire-framed glasses, a printed logo or a tightly patterned fabric come back as a few dry-brush marks rather than as drawn detail.

What the canvas wrap takes on a wash — It is the page that works out what the 49 mm mirrored wrap means for a style whose corners are bare paper: the band folded around the sides is open wash rather than subject, so the sides of the canvas continue as colour, and it says what the blooms, the granulation and the dry-brush marks look like at 20×25, 40×50 and 60×75 cm.

Five centuries of the same medium — Its history section is about watercolor itself rather than about one painter: Dürer's studies in the Albertina, the English landscape school and Turner's bequest to the nation, and the American watercolors of Homer and Sargent that made the medium a serious way to paint a person.