How to Combine Watercolor Painting with 3D Texturing

Introduction 

I’m Beno Raistrick, I’m from the Cotswolds, England, and at the moment I’m studying Games Art at Arts University Bournemouth, where I’ve chosen to specialise in environment art. I’ve always been interested in visual and digital arts, I can remember using Blender 2.79 back when I was 11 years old and being pretty fascinated with the idea of modelling and rendering something entirely on the computer (despite the terrible UI). At that time, I was also getting into animation, Photoshop, and concept art, but I always pursued these as hobbies.

YouTube has been my teacher for over a decade now, and seeing what other people were making really led me to explore my options for further education, which is how I ended up studying Games Art at university. For a long time I thought I wanted to be a concept artist for games and film, watching people like FZD School, Trent Kaniuga, and Walid Feghali, but at some point I felt like I hit a wall with my artistic progress, and that’s when I got really really into 3D. The speed at which I could create and see results in 3D also helped motivate me further.

Traditional Art

Growing up, I didn’t limit myself to digital art. I was very into drawing and sketching, as well as a bit of watercolour painting. As for oil painting, this is something I only picked up a couple of years ago. Between college and university, I took a year out to do an art and design foundation course, which was a great opportunity for me to teach myself how to paint in oil.

So I think it was the beginning of 2024 that I started painting with oils, but I was specifically teaching myself to paint in the style of the old masters (John Singer Sargent, Velasquez, Bonnat). I then got extremely into landscape painting en plein air, where I would take my paints outside and paint what I see in front of me. I am yet to try combining my oil paints with 3D textures, but I have seen some interesting results from people like Bobert Art. The reason I’m using watercolour for 3D environments is that it’s so quick (and cheap), and I find it already has its own stylized quality to it, whereas oils can be messy and take a long time to dry.

2D-to-3D Texturing

It’s a pretty recent process for me. In the winter of 2025, I created a small environment in Unreal Engine based on a painting by Karl Terry, in which all of the textures were ‘painterly’. They weren’t done with real paints; I simply used a pen tablet and Photoshop to create alpha masks that looked like paint strokes, so I guess that’s the earliest point of contact for me. But it wasn’t until earlier this year that I thought about putting actual watercolour painted textures into 3D. It just seemed like such a unique way of texturing my scenes, and it’s also a super fun process. I’d seen videos by Cody Gindy of making textures with paints, which I’m sure subconsciously influenced me to do the same. 

I was actually incredibly happy with my first results, focusing on a coastal town as the basis of the models and textures. In fact, it’s these first few test textures that got a really substantial amount of views on my Instagram account, leading me to make a full tutorial.

Typically, I aim for a workflow similar to the industry standard for texturing, but with paints. That means using trim sheets, decals, atlases, and tiled textures. I make sure there’s a reason behind everything I do, whether that means cramming textures together on one square to take up empty UV space, or knowing when to choose a tileable material over a unique one. I usually would do the modelling stage first, that way I can see the general shape of the texture that is needed for that area which makes it easier when it comes to the painting stage.

In Krita, I’ll adjust things like the levels and contrast first, before either creating a texture atlas/trimsheet by squeezing textures together, or I’ll make a seamless texture by using the clone stamp brush.

Working in Blender

I would say it’s important to know what object you are painting on. If I’ve got a window that is quite crooked and warped, I’m not going to be painting a straight-edge window. I always check the shape of the object first and try to paint something that fits that shape best. At the end of the day, it’s a lot of experimentation, but you can definitely train your eye to better see how a texture might fit onto your objects. Since I don't really use normal maps, a lot of the detail depends on modeling. Sure, a painted brick wall texture looks nice, but it requires modelling a few bricks too to sell the effect. I also find that the closer your model and texture line up, the more they appear as a cohesive element in your scene.

Lighting & Rendering

For lighting, I’m a sucker for a good sunset look. In Unreal, I’ll just set the directional light low down and adjust the source radius to give some softer shadows. I’ve experimented with creating heightmaps and normal maps from my watercolour textures, but it’s been hard to find any usable results with that, so maybe I’ll save it for another video. 

Something I think lends nicely to these textures is a shallow depth of field. There’s a technique in photography called tilt-shift, which uses a special lens to adjust the focal plane, making photos look like miniature models. Adding a shallow depth in Unreal also gives this effect, and combined with the hand-painted textures, it can make the whole scene look like a handmade model. 

Beauty of Hand-Painted Textures

The thing I love most about this technique is how physical and tactile it is. Something I’m really passionate about as a student looking to break into the industry is how we can find unique art styles to combat the ever-growing use of AI. I’d say I hold a pretty strong ‘anti-AI’ stance, especially when it comes to creative industries like games, but more and more I’m seeing AI being incorporated into large studios. Just this week, Epic announced that they would be pursuing an all-AI workflow for their game partnership with Disney. I want to promote a human way forward, and I think by creating something that takes so much care as to hand-paint individual textures, it inspires people to pursue their arts in spite of generative AI. 

I think there’s a misunderstanding that this technique takes hours and hours, but really it can take just a few minutes to paint and get nice results. I mean, compared to painting stylized textures in Substance 3D Painter, it probably works out at around the same amount of time and effort. I would strongly encourage anyone to have a go! Whether it’s with watercolours, pens, pencils, oil paints.

My one tip would be to really enjoy the opportunity to use a traditional medium in your work! Enjoy the grain of the paper, or the mixing of real paints!

Future Projects

I think I’d like to work on a game demo with hand-painted textures, something I can put up on Steam to gauge interest. Then, if it seems interesting to enough people, I’d certainly do my best to create some sort of full game around that. Whether that’s all on my own or with a small team, who knows? 

I’d absolutely love to make some more tutorials. As I’ve mentioned, I’m still looking into normal maps and displacement maps for these textures. Maybe my next tutorials will be about creating foliage? Of course, I could always be that guy and make a Minecraft texture pack from watercolour paintings.

Beno Raistrick, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Kseniya Serebrennikova