Any way to paint a lighter watercolour over a darker one and have it be lighter?

[Wadanny]

Hello,

I'm having one of these odd problems that seems like it should be very easy to solve and yet it is difficult to describe. Basically I do a lot of my art with Painter 12 by scanning a hand-drawn sketch and rendering it in the program. I use watercolour brushes to do this which I like as it preserves the line drawing beneath. Where I run into trouble is trying to lighten a patch of uniform colour I have painted onto the picture. When I try to use a lighter shade of the watercolour which I have just used it darkens the image rather than brightens it. Is there anyway around this? Perhaps another brush which can overlay directly ontop of the old colour without acting as if I am painting a real watercolour image?

Again apologies for the ineptitude, any advice is most welcome! :-)

[Michael]

You mean something like the brush in the attached Xara document?

bleachbrush.xar

[Wadanny]

Hey Michael, thanks for replying so fast - I'll have a look at that.

[Wadanny]

I haven't seen a .xar file before, I see it is an archive of somekind and Google recommended a program to open it called 7-zip but it crashes on opening. Could you possibly suggest a program to open it? Thanks!

[MVMusic]

I haven't seen a .xar file before, I see it is an archive of somekind and Google recommended a program to open it called 7-zip but it crashes on opening. Could you possibly suggest a program to open it? Thanks!

A .xar file is a document created in Photo & Graphic Designer and you can't use it in painter, but somebody might have a similar idea to use within painter...

[handrawn]

the equivalent to what Michael did in painter is probably to use layer/blend modes