Going With the Flow

Issue #19

Style Over Substance

Water is the topic of these next two newsletters. How do you draw it? Or, more specifically, how do I want to draw it? Because as I’ve been progressing through these elemental topics, it’s been occurring to me that figuring out how to draw an accurate flame or rocky outcrop is less important to me than figuring out how I want these things to look in my comic. So I’m setting out on this journey to learn how to draw water in my style above all else.

That means it’s out with the real-life pictures and straight into stylized reference images for me. Because water is also a bit of an anomaly in the drawn world. It has an undeniable shape and flow, but when you look at real water and compare it to how it was drawn in a comic or show, you notice very quickly that the two are not exactly one-to-one. Yet, we all agree these are representations of water.

So let’s dive into the essentials of what makes drawn water look like drawn water, and then follow me as I figure out which of these elements I want to use to define my water-drawing style.

Let’s get to it.

The Basics

To get started, I’m looking at the simplest form of water you can think of: the humble water droplet. It’s an easily recognizable shape, and even without color you know what it is.

I think the water droplet is an excellent example of the basic principles of water. The first is that water is curvy. Teardrops, ovals, and circles are extremely common shapes you’ll see water in. Water has this constant, undeniable roundness to it no matter what shape it takes.

That means when it comes to shading, the basic principles of shading round objects can apply, and that’s what a lot of my references backed up.

Many drawings of water droplets did one of two things: one, it put its shaded side at the rounded bottom of the drop the way you might shade a sphere, or two, it shaded the drop using a darker circle inside the most bulbous part of the drop.

There are two schools of thought at play here. The first demonstrates the basic way a sphere is shaded when light hits it from above, and the second takes the properties of water into consideration.

A real drop of water looks clear to us. Not blue, like we often color it. Fun fact, water is, in fact, a little blue, it’s just that in small quantities like a waterdrop or glass of water we can’t perceive this tiny amount of blue. It’s only once you get a large body of water, like, say the ocean, where this blue color becomes pronounced.

Think of it like looking through a pane of glass that has a slight, almost imperceptible blue tint to it. The more panes you stack on top of each other, the more that blue color begins to stack up and becomes visible.

Lighting, minerals in the water, and various other factors contribute to changing the color of water, but these are the basics.

So back to that teardrop with a dark blue middle. What’s happening?

Well, the middle of the teardrop is where the water is “thickest”, so sometimes artists choose to color the center darker blue to represent that being the “deepest” part of the water and, therefore, the darkest blue.

Again, on a small scale like a teardrop, this wouldn’t be noticeable, but we’re in artist land right now. We do what we want. Within reason.

That leaves the lighter parts as, obviously, the highlighted areas. Parts where the light is reflecting off the surface of the water. Regardless of how you choose to shade a teardrop, the general idea that the highlight will show up on the roundest part of the sphere still applies, with some warping to account for that teardrop shape.

As the shape and size of the waterdrop grows, I found that most artists stuck to the idea of having a light and dark side to the drop as if it were a solid object.

See here how globs of water are shaded as if they had a solid form with the shadows appearing along the bottom and highlights on the top, roundest parts.

However, everything changed once the quantity and shape of the water reached larger proportions.

Making Waves

Water splashes up and out on impact. The impact shape tends to look like an upside down trapezoid, with variety coming from the intensity and scale of the impact.

For example, here's a poorly drawn water splash. Spoiler, most of these water splashes are going to look bad, but that’s why I’m learning.

At a smaller scale from, say, a small rock or marble dropping into water or a waterdrop striking a surface, you get these globby branches flinging outward from the source.

The shading technique favors coloring the splash with the darkest parts along the bottom and highlights along the branches. This is a very simple rendition of a small splash.

But what happens at a larger scale?

Well, now things get a little complicated.

References I found for larger splashes started getting a lot more abstract with their coloring. In some examples the concept of shading a dark center where the water is “thickest” seems to apply.

In others, darker shading is used to imply the back part of a splash to visually separate it from the front part.

In another, which feels more like an explosion of water than something caused by an external impact, it’s shaded like a rock with an obvious light side and dark side.

As I went deeper into these wave shapes, the style choices made it pretty difficult to nail down a general rule for shading water. In another wave example, it seems to combine the idea of darker parts being along the bottom of the wave and also some shading in thicker areas of water. Highlighting is used to imply the motion of the water and emphasize round parts.

Take a look at this waterfall. Here, the darker parts imply thicker, denser patches of water, and the highlighted parts create the vertical stream for your eye to follow before hitting the churning bottom of the waterfall.

As I progressed in my stylized studies, I found that the use of the highlight color often served two purposes: to imply roundness and to imply directional force.

In these studies, that’s exactly what we get. The highlight color is doing a lot of the heavy lifting to add roundness and dynamic motion to the water. A lot of the highlight lines feel haphazard in their placement, and some are present to add more visual intrigue, but there’s an undeniable direction the highlight color takes your eye along the piece.

The shadows at this point are just that. Shadows. In fact, I was often finding that the shadows stuck directly behind areas of highlight or implied motion, as if the churning of the water created thicker, tangible spots that cast shadows going into the main body. I think this is clearest when drawing a seemingly calm, but still textured, water surface.

A lot of examples will draw the highlights on top and then a rough rendition of those highlights in shadows beneath. Usually not a perfect one-to-one match or it looks too artificial, but close enough that you can infer the shadows are a direct result of the highlighted portions casting a shadow.

Diving Deeper

Now that I felt I was beginning to understand the ways in which artists stylize their water, it was time to step it up a notch. I found examples specifically of water as it was being controlled by some magic user and replicated them using the knowledge I’d picked up so far.

These definitely have a distinctive style. Once again, the highlighted parts are used both for roundness and direction, but these also feel foamy. They have their own masses that cast a second layer of shadow. Making the water foamy gives it that churning, high velocity feel. These water moves are coming at you with force.

I did get a little fancy with my coloring and threw some soft airbrush shades and highlights where I thought it was appropriate to add more depth. It worked some of the time.

In these globby, softer water examples the shading flip-flops between implying thickness and implying shape. It really does seem to be up to the artist at that moment what they want the shaded parts to imply.

Regardless, I felt like I was starting to get it. Highlights were for shape and direction. Shading was for mass and thickness. I also sort of liked the idea of frothing water adding extra shapes and dynamic elements, so I decided it was time to get off script and see what I could do without a reference.

The answer: eh. I definitely still have more to learn.

I started by drawing the major shapes and directions and adding where the largest directional highlights would be.

Then I colored it all in using my own knowledge of shading and taking notes from what I’d learned so far.

The water whip looks alright in my opinion. The one where I gave it a defined orb shape with a tail went a little off the rails. The foam looks like a poofy head of hair rather than foam, and I noticed that the fluffier I made the foam the slower it felt like the water was moving. Which, for a shape like this, created a very odd effect I didn’t quite like.

The waterfall shows I’m learning, but it could use some refinement. It looks very cartoonish right now.

And the water drop…that’s my least favorite. Just like with flames, I don’t know why I’m not particularly good at the delicate curves required to make convincing fire and water shapes. I feel like I’m probably just going to have to draw a million of them until whatever isn’t clicking in my brain makes a connection or gets it down to muscle memory.

For a first week of studies, this feels like it’s headed in a solid direction. I can clearly see where my understanding is lacking, which means next week I need to focus on those parts and see where my studies take me from there.

But that’s for next week. For now, it’s time for something a little different from my usual endings.

Project of the Week

Okay, this final section is going to get some changes going forward. As I’ve been shifting my priorities around to ensure I’m making progress toward my goals, it’s become evident that painting might have to start taking a backseat to everything else. I have some goals I really, really want to get to fast, and taking time out every week to paint isn’t helping me progress those goals at the moment.

However, in place of physical painting, I’ll be working on other skills that are necessary for furthering my goals, and I still plan to share that progress here. So, instead of a painting a week, I’ll start talking about a project each week. Maybe sometimes I’ll dip back into painting, but I already have a list of ideas for things I want to work on with this newfound free time.

To kick things off this week, I want to share a side project I recently completed that I’m very proud of. In a previous newsletter, I talked about how I’ve been challenging myself to make colored pencil drawings on black cardstock. Though I certainly slowed my progress, I never stopped, and my most recent one turned out really good. So good, in my opinion, that it became the catalyst that convinced me I need to refocus my efforts on my art studies in the name of creating works of art I genuinely believe I can sell someday.

So here it is, my recent colored pencil art. For some context, I’ve been making these little cards with various subjects on them each representing a different character from The Chosen One’s Mentor. This one is for the kingly and kind Nolan.

My colored pencil game has leveled up a ton off screen. This is my proudest work to date, and it makes me excited to see what I’ll make next.

I don’t have much to say on this piece other than, “Marvel at it”, so that will wrap things up for this week. Tune in next week for more water studies and the next project of the week.

Thanks for reading.