Video

Intro

Well hello there, this is Tamil. Today I wanted to share tips on how to paint better water. I will cover different water types and how to approach color and light when it comes to it. Let's get started!

 

I will upload all the pictures on gumroad for free if they look too tiny on the website!

Water drop

Before approaching water it is best to start simple. The smallest amount is a water drop. The easiest one to find is dew in the morning. Small drops on leaves and spider web. Looking up dew pictures helped me find good resources to study.

Here is a small breakdown that I made.

 

1) Start with mid-tone color. Like 50% grayish. Find ground and draw the sketch for the drop. Find where the light is coming from.

 

2) Define core colors and shadows. The light is coming from the top left, so that part of the water drop will be taking the highlight. The drop itself will cast a shadow, so paint a shadow below the drop.

 

3) Water will show the color of whatever is behind usually. Because it is a leaf, the drop will be green. Add some darker green around the sphere. Essentially it is a ball or oval, so it will show form by having a slight shadow around it.

 

4) Define darker and brighter parts. Mix colors to make smaller transitions. I just used a simple transparent brush for this.

 

Look at the last picture for the breakdown. Light will go through and hit the floor and then go in every direction after. So the floor will have a lot of light as well. Usually, that does not happen because objects are not transparent like water.

Add some cute bug for infinite pro art move! Maybe they will make friends someday.

Lake Reflection

Let's go over simple lake reflection for a landscape painting. This technique is pretty common for still and clean water.

First, we need a simple painting, anything that has a water line will do the trick. After you finished your painting, just duplicate the entire canvas.

Select the portion of the image that is not water. I just used a simple polyline tool.

Delete everything else outside of that portion.

Flip it vertically. You can do it with Ctrl+T, right-click, Flip Vertically. You can just move it down where the water will be. You can leave this as is if you want. Sometimes water will look very still.

 

Delete the bottom portion of the image with an airbrush tool. Small gradual opacity helps.

Mask that portion so that the water in the image will only be reflected there.

Use Filter -> Distort -> ZigZag. These are my settings. They will depend on the type of water and the image scale.

Use Liquify tool or smudge to add more ripples where you think it feels too small.

Reduce opacity for the distorted layer. It helps to blend in with the image and will look more interesting.

 

If you feel like it is hard to follow the text, I highly recommend going over to my video. I show step by step with all the tools used.

Waves

Waves are the most fun things to paint out of all water for me personally. It has a lot of color variety and many stylization opportunities.

 

Do you like to study classic painters? I suggest looking into Aivazovsky. His artwork is filled with great waves and water in general. Most of his paintings are in the ocean. It got me super inspired when I started out.

The main idea for a wave is that it becomes a tube that spiral on the inside. The bigger it gets, the more the top part will start falling down.

 

The color scheme is a lot of blues, but do not forget about cyan. Cyan and white will be your friend when it comes to waves. That is where the light will be hitting. Deep deep blue is where the deep shadows will be present.

 

1) Find a simple reference and create a spiral. Draw lines to show in which direction the wave is going to go.

 

2) Fill in the water with medium blue. Using blue for lines also helps to give it more personality.

 

3) Find out where the light is coming from. Make sure that it will be more transparent and less blue. Find core shadows. Green and cyan areas are brighter parts.

 

4) Add some wave swooshes where the wave ends. It is easy to make them by using the lasso tool. Start blending in colors.

 

5) Add a duck on a surfing board because nothing can beat that. Also, use Overlay. Cyan and dark blue to emphasize the light and dark parts.

 

6) Add a white rim to the wave and characters in your scene. I used a simple circle scatter brush from the foam. The edges of the wave will start evaporating into smaller drops mid-air, so make sure to show that as well. That's what sells the movement.

Do not get hung up on details. Try to make big fun shapes and use lots of colors. Check it in black and white for a good contrast.

Water Refraction

This one gets a little bit scientific, so I will not go over it too much. The main idea is that if you see things under water or mid water, they are actually not on the same spot. It is super easy to test. Just grab a cup of water and put a pencil in there. Half of the pencil will be shifted because of how the light changes your perseption.

If you stand in the middle of the water, your legs will be just a little bit distorted. It usually happens more when the water is not deep too. Most artists do not use it because it makes the painting look weird, but maybe you can find a way to make it work for the story!

 

Also refraction will make objects appear about 30% larger under water.

Color Under Water

There is a lot that can be said about color change underwater. If you want to get into the topic more then look for " UnderWater Color Loss".

 

The very short version of the theory is that the colors change to more blue as it goes deeper. It takes away the red and adds green and mostly blue.

As you can see, there is more blue. It also depends on the distance. Further deeper objects will make for a darker blue tone. Outside of the water, the closest objects will be darker and further ones will become more bright and cyan. Under water, it becomes either blue or green. If it is a swamp then it will look greener the further you look.

Just a simple start for a painting that could be used as a good example for a swamp. Because the water has a lot of dirt and plants in it, we can just keep adding green the further we go.

Just used dark green as an overlay. Added main shadows and thinking about further parts.

Adding more multiply green further back again. Let's add some light from the sun.

Mostly it will hit in small beams of light and hit the top part of the surface. Water does not have very hard shadows in most cases. Most of the light spreads around more even compared to air. Yellow will make the water even more green and bright.

The same rule applies to the ocean as well. Further objects will be dark blue and the light from the top will look cyan mostly. Not lot of yellow.

Waterfall

A waterfall is another great way to bring some movement and life into your landscape paintings.

1) I start with simple outlines of what I want for the waterfall. A good way to think about a waterfall is how it turns into big chunks of moving water, kinda like flowing hair.

 

2) Set up base colors. The waterfall can be a lot of colors, mostly it is more white because of how fast the water movies. That creates foam and bubbles, which leads to having more white.

 

3) Set up basic shadows. The rock in the middle of the water will block the movement. Water will not reach under it. Because of that, there will be a visible opening under.

 

4) Add a lot of brightness to the top, while the bottom will fizzle away. It will become more transparent and will look more like a fog.

For the last image, I used curves and an overlay airbrush. Making the top bluer. I also used the trick from the last part about reflecting the bottom of the water.

 

If you look at the rock you will see that there is some foam forming around it too. It is because of the current of the water. A moving lake will create that effect around objects that stay still. For example, if you stand in moving water, there will be a little bit of white around it on the surface.

If you ignore the cute turtle in the middle, you can see how the current of the water will hit the rock and go around it. Just add some brighter color on top and make sure to show movement. It will sell the idea.

Water Caustics

Water caustics are the funny-looking shapes that move at the bottom of the pool if you ever dive into one. It's hard to explain because it is very random and the science behind it is somewhat heavy.

 

Let's go and make a tileable pattern for it in Clip Studio Paint. This way we can go back and reuse it for any other paintings.

Make a 2000 by 2000 new canvas. Making a square pattern is way easier than any other format.

Start with a mid tone cyan. Add darker blue. The shapes should be something that represents tears and liquid. The easiest way to do this is to use an airbrush.

Slowly start adding brighter cyan for the in between parts of the blobs that you made. It should be pretty easy to paint on top of it. I used an airbrush for this as well.

To finalize this I go with a transparent brush and emphasize the cyan parts. It should look more defined and crisp compared to before.

Then I flatten everything I have. Right-click on the layer and select Convert Layer.

Select Image Material layer for Type.

Use operation tool. Make sure to turn on Tiling at the very bottom! This is important.

Now you can move it around and see where it does not tile. Try to make the plus to meet the middle.

Paint on top to connect all the tiles and try to blend it together.

Do it again! Move it and find weird parts that do not align. Doing it twice is usually enough for me.

After you are done use curves or color adjustment to make it pop. Select everything with Ctrl+A and go to Edit -> Register Material -> Image

On this panel just make sure to name it and select a folder you can find later. Turn on Tiling. This will save the project to your materials.

To give a quick example I just dropped it on my canvas. I used Ctrl+T to change my perspective on it. To do that you can just grab the handles and move them around while holding ctrl.

 

Adjust it to the perspective you like for the image. There are perspective tools in CSP that I have covered before on my tutorials if you want to look into it.

For this example, I just put a duck on it and drew the sky with clouds. It is very simple, but fun to practice. Do not go too complicated on your first try! Also do not be afraid to paint on top to make sure there is some variation in the wave.

Also, look at the bottom of the duck. I added some white lines to signify that it is touching the water, just like with a rock last time.

If you feeling lazy you can always just download the official Clip Studio Paint material for water haha. I used it for one of my landscape paintings and it worked really well!

It was not the focal point of the image, so it worked very well for this. I blended it with the reflection of the mountains too. If you want to see the full process for this, this was an old tutorial I made as well.

There are many resources you can find on Clip Studio Paint material store. A lot of them are free and made by other artists. Just hunt around with a water hashtag.

Bubbles

Bubbles are an amazing way to add more depth to your illustration. Especially if you are painting something underwater. It is also easy to add bubbles to your painting.

Start with a circle. Just get a very hard round brush and do a simple circle. We will only use this for selection. Just Ctr+Left Click on the layer and it will be selected. You can hide the layer after this.

Using a selection from the circle, I used an airbrush and a simple opacity brush to only add highlights. Make sure the inside is transparent. This will be important in the future.

Using the same selection I added some cyan and purple glow around it. Added a little bit to the highlights as well. There could be a lot of color variation inside of it. Make sure to use brighter tones and saturated colors if you want to get the same effect as mine. It has to be above 50% gray.

I added an overlay to highlights with an airbrush. You do not have to do this. Sometimes putting so much details can detract from the viewer. I just grouped all the layers together and duplicated it 2 times. Nothing complicated.

 

Make sure to rotate them and add size variation. Big, medium, small.

You can merge the group and set it to overlay or screen. Play around with opacity as well. This will allow you to use Liquify to change the shape of the bubbles. Think about where they are going and where they came from. Usually, they go up to the surface.

 

In this case, I just drew a fish that will be cute looking next to the bubbles.

I duplicated bubbles and reduced opacity as if it is in the distance. That's about it. You can make a library of 2-3 different bubbles that you can reuse in the future.

 

Here is another example where I used bubbles for my mobile game concept.

As you can see, it is a lot less fancy and just uses a few bright colors around it.

Simplified Water

If you think you just want to get something more simplified and fluid, you can always try to get closer to animation water.

 

Because people need to draw it a lot and quickly, usually it is around 3 colors. Cell shading is an amazing style for water.

You can just start with shapes in dark blue. I really enjoy making watery shapes. Just think about the fluidity and also you can try to use the lasso fill tool for this. It is extremely underrated in my opinion. Making this with the lasso is super easy.

 

I made a video on it if you never saw it, I highly recommend it. I made an entire painting only using lasso.

After that, I just use a clipping mask. There are plenty of tutorials for clipping masks, including my old ones. I just grabbed a darker version of the blue and started filling in the bottom parts of the water. Mostly thinking about light coming from the top.

Then just grab a very light blue and do the same. Think about there the water will become less thick and add a whoosh feeling around it.

You are pretty much done! I just added some small props around the water to add more story to it. Something to interact it with.

 

As a last touch, you can always go with overlay or color dodge on this. Add smaller water particles too. Use gradients to soften the transition too.

The End

This concludes the tutorial for water. I hope this was helpful and you learned something.

 

Let me know if you have any questions about water. I will try to answer them if I know how to. You can subscribe, like, and share this video around if you think it will help other artists. Thank you so much and happy painting.

My links

Notes for this tutorial to download for free!