Here's some "water gimmicks"
Water illustrations!
I have a beginner friend testing to see if this method could be helpful for so I'm kinda nervous, I would love some feedback regarding that.
The tutorial is long but it's mostly images because it's very visually driven, I hope you have fun trying to figure out how to make colorful water art as much as I did.
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Droplets and Bubbles
Let's start by droplets and bubbles, there's a clear difference between those because droplets will often be seen on the surface above the water, while bubbles are tiny air pockets that happens to be under water.
Droplets will often connect to each other by a thin string of water, while bubbles won't, and heres how we can make those: lets start by sketching some circles like this:
Now by using the lasso tool, or just outlining it, we can fill our shapes:
Now we choose a darker shade for the shadows.
Notice how on the droplets the shapes will be broken and random.
While in the bubbles it will be completely round:
Now we add simple white highlights, making sure we outline the droplets to so it will stand out around darker backgrounds:
Splash and Impact
When we splash water, throw it around, slap it, it make funny shapes like this, while in counterpart, when we dive or throw an object inside the water, the impact will create several air bubbles floating towards the surface, here's how you can make this effect:
First, sketch It! Use a lot of circles:
Using the lasso tool is one hundred times easier to make this difficult shapes, so I highly recommend you try it!
Lasso tool > lasso fill:
Lasso tool for bubbles:
Using the lasso tool we create shadows and light for the splash.
And shadows for the bubbles:
And now finish it with highlights, don't be afraid to splash a lot of white droplets around the drops.
And create a lot of small flowing bubbles underwater:
Swirls/ripples
Also called water ripples, it's the roundy shape the surface of the water makes when touched by ANYTHING.
You could draw a solid blue frame and put a swirl on it and it would still look like water.
So let's go, step one: draw a lot of circles:
Now we break the circles and paint it, locking the layer and choosing very similar hue tones (analog colors):
Add this shape on top for the light:
Add some more details and voila!
You can also use this method to draw big and clear water sighs, if you don't really like using the water caustics method, and if you happen to have difficulty drawing this, you can also use this asset I found made specifically for drawing water ripples:
Waves
When the water is moody and there's a storm, it often behaves like this, it's nothing like a big 12 feet tall wave but starting with simple and smaller ones is the way to go.
We start by drawing connected lines shaped like a honneycomb of hexagonal cells like this:
Now we connect the lines making it thick and pointy in the areas it connects:
Let's duplicate the layer and make it a shadow by coloring it in a darker shade and turning down the opacity or setting it as a multiply layer:
Now we use the lasso tool to create these lighter shapes inside:
And finish it by adding some white sprinkles and wobbly lines!
Still water...
This is the far the most common and simple one, a calm surface of water with caustics patterns: A wavy, string-like light patterns caused by light bending through and reflecting off moving water.
They are also called Specular reflection lines (for a more technical/art terms)
But in stylized drawing/animation, it’s often just called “water surface lines” or “rippling highlights.”
Let's start by drawing some circles and lines connected around:
Now we make the area where it connects very thick and erase some bubbles inside the area it connects:
Duplicate it and make it a shadow just like the waves above:
Now we sprinkle some water droplets above, and voila:
To create the second image, we're using a feature in csp called “free transform” by copying the final product and bending it over to create a perspective illusion:
Here's some ideas of how and where you can use it in an actual illustration:
Water reflections and transparency
Reflections
Otto is my oc, she's going for a beach trip today and is looking at the mirror to see if her outfit is cute, but something is not right, can you figure out what is it?
Reflections are often made by flipping the image over and calling yourself done: but be careful, if the character back is looking towards you, it means the reflection will be the front of the character and vice-versa.
Its the exact same thing for Reflections in water, but here we have a few extra steps to make it interesting, take this frame I made of Otto in the water, it's kinda dull right?
Let's add some highlights and reflected-lights on top of her, the body areas that are near the water are often affected by caustics reflections and end up shining like this:
It's called rim-lights:
Now, let's add a faint shadow of Ottos body under her, by drawing this broken shapes reminiscents of legs:
And with your airbrush, gently erase under it to make it even more soft, if you feel like it's still too dark, turn down the opacity:
Now let's add our quirky reflection, in some cases, you can just flip it over like this:
But as we're facing an angle from above the things get a little bit more complicated:
In the first point of view, it’s actually a case where you can simply flip your character over and you will have a perfect reflection.
But the second point of view, even though you are looking at the character from above, the mirror (or water surface) will actually reflect the object as if you were looking beneath it, and the reflection will actually behave more like this:
Theres also a hierarchy of objects in water reflections that works like this: If there's a big object under your main object (in this case a floaty under the girl's arms) the reflection under it will show the floaty first, often hiding the objects over it:
And under the water reflections also appear in the water ceiling as well, but more distorted and less visible:
So now let's draw our new reflection and place it under your character:
Using an airbrush eraser or a noise brush eraser, we erase the areas around the Reflections and near the light source, also turning down the opacity of the image a bit:
Now we add a motion blur effect, because It will be mostly moving to the waters movement too:
And to finish we add a wobbly effect called “ripple” effect, which will make our reflection wobbly just like it would look like in real life:
Now add your highlights back and done!
Looks way better than the first version!
Cool right?
Transparency
But damn, looks like a ghost got Otto by her feet and dragged her under water, that doesn't sound fun at all.
Now we're looking at her from over the surface of the water, and water has pretty good transparency so we can still fully see her under it, but how can we make it look like she is under the water?
Well let me show you:
First add a multiply layer on top of the character image with a dark shade:
Now we add caustics effects over the character with the “screen layer” effect, if you don't wanna draw it, you can use some of these brushes:
Then we use the wobbly effect on the image I showed you earlier (ripple):
On top we add a “water surface texture” you can find those all over clip studio assets:
Add the caustics shadow (like in the still water tutorial):
And finally the highlights! This frame makes me kinda nervous thou:
But dont worry she's fine, the shores are quite shallow, but given the opportunity let's talk about a underwater photography style that works like a “x-ray”:
While Otto is kinda grossed out by the water salty flavor and wet clothes, lets learn how to draw this effect:
This photography style is very common in sea and pool pictures, and it's vastly used in illustrations too, the camera lens are divided between the surface and underwater, so you can see both over and under it, it creates a cool effect of divided world where you can play with effects, colors dynamics and shapes, so to learn how to draw it, let's start by making a S water shape over her waist line, you can make it a multiply layer:
Now with a neutral color we add these shapes over the water, adding random lines too:
We draw a dark shade in the middle making it a lighter edge shape:
Then add highlights:
There’s also a distortion that happens to the submerged part of the object, if you observe real life pictures of divided angles between underwater and surface, you gonna notice that the objects in sigh shifts the position a little bit to the side and become distorted, applying it to your drawing is completely optional, but I think it's valid to know it happens.
Underwater
Now looks like her toy was taken by the shores, so now she might need to dive in to get it…
Character compositing
Then it's time for the last part of this tutorial, the final boss of water illustration: underwater illustrations.
Then let's get serious and compose some stuff:
Posing
When posing a character underwater, they will mostly be floating or “flying” around it, so avoid making normal poses you would in normal ambients, and don't be afraid to experiment with positions like upside down, laying sideways etc, the gravity inside water is pretty much turn off so you can be very creative with your poses:
It's the same for clothes, acessories, hair etc, thin objects will often be floating around in random positions, practically not affected by gravity, I'd recomend you gather some real life references and study the physics of how objects behave underwater so you can have a more accurate outcome! But it's mostly simple to understand:
This is how my draft ended up, I choose a bold perspective position to show the action of “diving in” to get something underwater, I dont have much trouble working with characters in perspective but if you do, I have a simple trick that can save your poses, try using the 3d models inside csp to pose for you!
This pose pack is nice for underwater ambients:
Drag and drop your pose from the material library on your 3d models then adjust it:
Here’s a basic tutorial of how to use the 3d models:
If you hit manga perspective option on the tool property palette, your 3d bases will get a perspective effect that will make it even more dynamic:
But before, my pose was kind of wrong and not very visually appealing, that's the reason I used the Fibonacci spiral to correct my composition proportions.
The Fibonacci spiral is a spiral created by drawing circular arcs that connect the opposite corners of squares arranged with side lengths following the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, …).
The pattern is present EVERYWHERE in nature and it's often used by artists to create accurate and appealing compositions in Ilustrations, so if your drawing feels weird, toss a Fibonacci spiral over it and see if following their proportions helps it look better, in my case, it was a life saver for my pose:
Coloring
I'm not showing lineart because I separated the character for animation later (lemme know if your interested in after effects animation tutorials btw) and the lineart was really hard to understand, but I mostly used thick lines for the areas closer to the camera and thin lines behind, making it thick also helps separate the character from the confusing background, and with the color bases, I also colored the lineart for the best visual appeal we can have:
If you want eye catching colors I suggest we work with bright and contrasting colors because there's a phenomenon that makes your objects lose colors inside water.
It's called selective absorption and scattering of light.
Water absorbs the longer wavelengths of light (reds, oranges, yellows) first as you go deeper.
The more deeper, more bluish the ambient becomes, so slap as much as bright colors as you can:
Light and shadows
Talking about colors, I should mention that rim-light phenomenon also happens inside the water, the light reflects on the bottom surface and bounces over to your character under parts, creating a light bluish highlight, the red areas in this example is where the rim-light happens and the blue areas is the normal hard lights comming from above:
To finish it off, the further away from our eyes, the hazy and lighter the objects becomes underwater, so we can erase the hair a little bit then it will blend in the background.
Now our character is ready for illustration.
Background compositing
Using some shapes and low opacity brush I color-sketched more or less how I wanted the background to look like, rocks at the sides, light from above, and the sandy rocky bottom as the ground:
And some bubbles because, well she's, diving :D
This is the technical sketch of the background, I was experimenting with positions and objects in this one but damn, it's actually so easy to draw we don't even need this confusing thing:
Just toss a blue background like this, darker in the middle, use the airbrush to color it:
Now we outline our stones, something like this shape, there's a tutorial on how to draw stones if you find it difficult:
Now we fill it with objects like anemomas algae aquatic flowers etc (dont be afraid to look for references and oversimplify it).
And we color it, using high contrast colors like orange, purple, pink, because believe me, we're losing colors in this child play:
Then make the bottom, it's a Sandy ground so I did choose a yellowish color as main, and made some dark stripes behing it to simulate the ground disappearing into the background:
Staying in this context, lets make some light shapes disappearing in the background, plants and rock shapes, the further away the lighter it gets, you can make it in layers, and also toss in some fish as well:
Now we shade the rocks, creating a light on top of it as well, to give it an illusion of depth:
Finish your shading with darker hues, in your shading style ofc, mines blocky and simple but you can copy it if you want:
And for the cherry on top, we color the lineart, following the main colors of the objects and tossing in some dark green/turquoise plants as well:
Add our character back, and we're ready for the final phase:
Rendering "underwater"
Using your lasso tool, let's draw some circles and shapes like this, making them smaller near the edges, this will be our water ceiling:
Now we distort it to make it look like a ceiling, using the transform feature I taught you earlier:
Then just motion blur it:
Now lets draw some blue diagonal stripes to act as our light rays, it shines like this underwater because of the bending phenomenon that happens to the light on water surface.
Turn the layer to a “glow dodge” layer:
Now using a noise airbrush set to eraser, we gently erase the bottom, creating this fade:
Then duplicate the layer and motion blur again!
Adding our background back, this is how it looks like now:
Lets recap the the phenomenon of losing colors inside water.
As I said, it's called selective absorption and scattering of light, Here’s how it works:
“Water absorbs the longer wavelengths of light (reds, oranges, yellows) first as you go deeper.
At just a few meters, reds disappear.
Then oranges, then yellows.
Only blue and green light penetrate deeply, which is why the underwater world looks bluish.”
To add this effect in our background, I need you to create a layer that looks like this:
Erase the bottom with those stripes, to create water caustics on the ground and finally, set the layer to hard light and see the magic happens:
Now we add some fish swimming around, I used this colorful fish brush asset because I think it would look better:
Lens blur the fish :)
Then we Radial blur our entire background, the reason for that is that underwater, specially when we're in a moving scene, the ambient will be distorted by the water movement and our own sigh and visual focus, so applying different type of blurs on backgrounds is essential to improve the overall ambience:
Lens blur is a type of visual focus shifting blur, it's good for still objects and further objects too, while Radial blur is mostly used for motion and movement effects leading towards a central point, we also have Motion blur that's almost the same as radial, but without a focus point:
Now lets work on our character, she needs to fit in the background so let's add a multiply layer with blue and pinkish hues similar to the one we made for the background.
You can also erase parte of it to create water caustics on her skin surface and other parts, I was lazy so I didn't made lots of it, but if you like how it looks, I'd say go for it and make lots of caustics:
Add some white highlights on top of the heads!
We're pretty much done with the character, so let's work on our ○°●BUBBLES○°●
Following the image, I want you to sketch your bubbles utilizing those guides, curve and straight as needed:
Get your lasso tool and fill in the shapes of the bubbles, just like we did in the first tutorial:
Now add the bubbly shadows inside, not broken, just roundy:
Add the second set of shades, in a lighter tone:
Now add the white highlights and more bubbles, might look like this:
Upon merging it into a single layer, we drop the opacity to maybe 60%, turn the layer mode to “screen” and motion blur our bubbles:
Turn your lights back in and we're pretty much done:
That's it I guess, I’m glad you were able to come this far, and if you did, do you know how many times I forgot to draw Ottos leaf on top of her head? Comment if you found out, and lemme give you a hint, probably under 100 times hahaha.
I have another message for you down here, but see ya <3
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