Industrial Helix wrote:I much prefer the medium to photoshop colors and the sterility of computer perfection...
On the other hand (just to provide an alternate view on the issue)...
You still have to scan anything you do by watercolour (or oil paint, or charcoal, or ink) and the result will be pixels in a graphics file... just like what you can create in photoshop or gimp. So in principle, you can't really create anything with conventional methods that is not at least theoretically possible to create digitally.
For example... I have this nice software ArtRage that came free with my drawing tablet... it's a sort of "painting simulator", which gives you a canvas and a choice of virtual brushes and paints, and the results actually look a lot like conventionally painted & scanned images.
Anyway, my point is that hand-drawn is not necessarily always better, especially when the medium is digital graphics. You inevitably suffer a loss of quality and detail when you transfer your art from manual to digital. And working with digital medium gives you a certain preciseness: you get to measure stuff by the pixel, and you'll know exactly where each pixel ends up in...
All this said, I'm not against working with watercolours and scanners, but I think you should be using the watercolour as an asset instead of a limitation. For example: use of layers. Don't paint everything at once on one paper. Instead, paint the sea on one paper, then scan it and set it to a background layer. Then paint the land area on another paper, scan it and alpha mask it, then put it on a second layer. IMO it is foolish to do the whole graphics on one paper, discarding the #1 benefit you get from working in digital media - the use of layers.
Another thing that can be done: draw the shape of your land area digitally first. Then print the outline of your land on paper. Then fill the land area with watercolour, following the outlines. Scan, and alpha mask it with the land shape you drew digitally, and you're done. Simple!