“The power of water is its ability to take any shape” is something I heard (read?) a lot of times these last few months. It inspires me to apply many forms of water into an artwork.

 

This tutorial will focus on practical application water and its effects as extra details to your artwork like so.

Since the color of water depends a lot on its surroundings, I decided to put it into practice right away and explain it along the way. It’s the first time for me to explain things this way, I hope it works!

 

This will be our sample illustration.

Rain

When drawing rain, there’s two styles that you can use. First is the one using straight lines. You can opt to draw it freely by hand or by using the help of ruler. This style gives dynamics into the picture because of the dropping motion.

 

I drew this with Mapping Pen and Special ruler > Parallel line

In this style, angle and raindrop intensity can give different impressions. The more angled the raindrops are, the windier the setting would seem. While higher raindrop intensity equals heavier rain.

The other style is the one where you can see the water drop. It’s as if you’re using high speed camera. Draw the water drop in dots, then erase the inner part to make it look transparent. Or you can draw empty circles directly instead.

 

This style can give “stopped the moment in time” or slow motion feeling.

Of course, you can combine both! I used both in the sample illustration for this tutorial.

Water on Umbrella

Let’s close up our sample illustration! We’ll be adding water drops, dripping water and distort the colors on the umbrella to give it a wet look.

Because of gravity, the shape of the drip will be smaller on the top, bigger on the bottom. Don’t draw the drip too straight, it’s natural to look a little jaggy.

Drawing drips has comes in two styles. The first one, using a light color, draw the entire shape of the drip. Lock the layer, then paint the part further from light source with a color darker than the background.

 

You’ll have transparent looking drips that looks great on close ups where the drips are the main focus.

The second style works great on our sample picture. Water are transparent, thus invisible on bright surface. Pick the lighter color and paint the drip on the parts that are darker. There’s no need to add details because it’s not our main focus.

Then, add water droplets. Like the rain, you can draw dots then erase the inner part for transparency or straight up draw the empty circles. Add as many drops as you see fit.

When water drop hits a surface, it breaks into smaller drops that bounce back to the air. Draw it by using some white dots (or subtle lines) on the top part of the umbrella.

For the final touch, we’re going to tweak the character a bit. For the part of the character the overlaps with the umbrella, use Finger tip to distort the edges of the character and to blur the details. Try using bigger brush size so it actually spreads and blurs, smaller size will make it look too detailed.

 

It should look like the character’s edge is melting down to give the impression that there’s water flowing down the umbrella.

Do the same for the umbrella.

Reflection

Time to deal with the reflection! Copy everything above the water surface and merge them into one layer. Turn it upside down and drag it to fill the water surface.

The clarity of the reflection depends on the stillness. If the water is perfectly still, the reflection would have little to no distortion. With little current, there’s a little distortion. The greater the current is, the greater the distortion. If the water is turbulent, it’s likely to have no reflection at all.

 

It’s raining in this illustration with little current. We need the reflection to be a bit distorted. Use Motion Blur with this settings.

This is how it looks after the motion blur.

Mask the layer and erase the part furthest from the original. This is to bring the focus back to the center of the illustration and to give the water color variations.

Ripples

Ripples isn’t just circled pattern on water. Think of it like a mini wave. On the picture below, you can see how ripples look from the side (left) and how the shadow look if the light source comes from the top.

Give a little gap between the shadow and the next light (marked in red) to make the ripples look shallow enough to pass as ripples.

The above is how to draw ripples if it’s the main focus. For our sample illustration, the ripples isn’t the main focus and thus will be drawn in a slightly different way.

The water surface in the sample picture is in 1-point perspective.

Then, using Free Transform, adjust the ripples to the angle you want. If using the previous picture isn’t enough to fill the surface, copy-paste the ripples and adjust as desired.

Lock the ripple layer, then, with Soft Airbrush, color the ripples in a slightly lighter color than the surface. It’s done to make the ripples blend into the water.

Add shadow to the ripples to make look not flat in a similar manner to the shaded ripple on top of this section.

I used the middle tone of the water surface and paint the shadow on a layer with Blending Mode Multiply.

Water Surface

Paint the edge of the water in white. Water tends to raise a little when it’s in contact with a surrounding surface. In this case, the raised part reflects light.

I used Dense Watercolor (light pen pressure). This will also work to separate the reflection from the real thing.

Hide the ripple layer (optional). I like to use Transparent Watercolor brush to paint the water surface with. This is to blend the items and colors on the water surface.

If you prefer rougher hand painted look, try using Opaque watercolor.

Unhide the ripple layer (if you hid it on the previous step). Add sparkles. I used Sparkles C for this.

Copy and merge the water surface layers. Use Gaussian Blur.

Then, Mask Outside Selection. Still on the Mask, use Gradient Tool (Foreground to Transparent) at the bottom till a third of the water surface. The part closest to the camera will be subtly blurred. By lessening the detail, we’re directing the focus back to the middle.

Water Drop

Water drop depends so much on it’s surrounding, so I prefer to draw it last.

 

Draw the water’s shape in white, add some light reflections. Then, on another layer, outline the inner part of the drop in darker color.

Paint the inner part of the drop with two colors from the background.

Water droplet turn things upside down, so pick the colors with that in mind.

Add another color that contrasts with the drop’s current colors as highlight. Since the colors are warm and reddish, pick light blue. Lastly, add sparkles (optional)

If you’re drawing the drop on a white background, add outline to enhance the shape. Not advisable, though!

Draw several water drops as extra detail.

Not only as decoration, you can position the water drops strategically to draw the attention to the center.

Blur the drops with Gaussian blur. The closer it is to the viewer the blurrier it gets.

It’s finally done!

 

Let’s compare the samples before and after we add water. (Note: I added vignette effect to further draw the attention to the center.)

Outro and Full Picture

That’s it for now!

 

Drawing water and liquid is fairly easy and fun if you get the grasp of how it works. The recipe is pretty much consists of highlight, background color and shading. I hope you find this tutorial helpful.

 

Stay safe and have fun drawing!