how to drawing and painting water

How to Drawing and Painting Water.

You can color water for all sorts of purposes, such as creating centerpieces or other decorations, making a fun drink, or setting up a water playstation for your kids. There are a wide range of synthetic, natural, or even homemade options you can turn to. On the other hand, if you’re trying to color a picture of water, you can create realistic-looking waves or droplets by adding highlights and shadows.



Create water droplets by adding highlights to a bubble shape. Sketch out a circle or oval with a thin dark line, and fill it in with a blue or gray shade. Add a highlight on one side of the bubble by making a rectangle in a white or very light color. Make the rectangle slightly curved to match the shape of the bubble.

Make the drops look 3-dimensional by using different colors when coloring in the drop. Use a darker shade in the area immediately surrounding the highlight, and a slightly lighter shade on the opposite side of the droplet.

Blend all the colors within your drop to create a smooth, rounded shape, but give your rectangle highlight sharp edges.

Add extra shading around the inner edges of the drop with a darker color, and give the drop a small shadow on its outside edge to complete the look.





Paint ocean waves by making stacked wavy lines. Add a base color over the area where you want your water. Draw overlapping scalloped lines over the entire water area.

Each of the lines should look like several connected semicircles.

Make the wave shapes smaller and shallower for faraway waves, and bigger with more pronounced shadows for waves in the foreground.

Add white on the crests of some of the bigger waves to create the appearance of sea foam, and use a darker shade to make shadows underneath the peaks of the waves to portray depth.





Use diagonal lines when making a seascape with watercolor paint. Use a flat brush and create broad, slightly diagonal strokes to create your wave shapes. Make the strokes closer together and more horizontal towards the horizon of your picture. Leave some white space in between your waves to create the look of shimmering or foamy waves





Draw digital waves with a hard brush tool. Make a gradient-filled block of color over the area where you want your water to be, putting the darker shade towards the horizon. Use a brush tool with hard edges to create your squiggly wave shapes.

Add highlights to the peaks of your waves with a softer brush in a slightly lighter color. Paint ocean spray and foam onto the tops of your waves with a white or light brush.





Make water look more realistic by incorporating nearby colors. Water not only reflects white light, it mirrors other colors too. Your seascapes will look more realistic if you use other colors besides just blue shades.

For example, if you’re painting a seascape at sunset and the sky is orange, give the lighter highlights on the tops of your waves a slightly orange tint.





Color nearby objects by drawing them upside-down. First, draw your object, such as a floating boat or a tree-lined shore. Next, lightly sketch an upside-down version of each object right beneath it. Add in wavy lines both overtop of the reflected object as well as in the surrounding water.

Make the waves tighter together in the background, and farther apart in the foreground.

Where the wave shapes cross into the outline of the reflected object, make them the same color as the original object. For example, if you are drawing a brown tree trunk reflected into the water, make the wave shapes blue outside of the reflected outline, and brown inside of it.



Tips

If you’re making a centerpiece or other decoration, finish off your colored water by adding floating candles, plants or flowers. You could also add real or fake flowers to a vase with colored water.

If you don’t want to actually dye your water, but you want it to appear colored, buy a water-safe LED light and put it in your water-filled container. Alternately, place a small LED light underneath your water container and let the light shine up through the water.

Set up a color laboratory where your kids can experiment with pouring and mixing colored water. Add water and a little bit of non-toxic dye to some squeeze bottles, and let your kids have fun squirting the water out into bowls and ice cube trays and mixing different colors together!

Color your pool with non-toxic pool dye for some colorful summer fun. Make sure that the label says that it won’t stain skin, clothes, or the pool.

Try adding a drop or two of food coloring into a water balloon before you tie it up, or mix the dye into water inside of a balloon pumper, and use it to fill up water balloons. Have your kids pop the balloons in a play pool and watch the dyes mix to form new colors.