Refining My Water Style

Issue #20

Reviewing My Notes

You know, an interesting thing happens when you bother to study with any amount of regularity. Learning gets easier. And faster.

This week, I only did a small handful of water drawings, but, before I was done with them, I already felt semi-comfortable about the direction I was headed.

Sure, my skills could definitely still use some refinement, but the principles for drawing water in a stylized way were locked into my head by now, and that made things way easier.

So let’s review those principles.

First off, shading water takes one of two approaches: one, shade water like it’s a solid object with a light side and a dark side, or two, shade water like realistic water would be shaded with darker areas where the water is deeper. You can also mix-and-match these techniques within the same piece.

Second, use highlights and frothing to imply direction and intensity. This is especially relevant in water attacks, where a magic user is chucking a bunch of water at an enemy. White, frothy lines can give a sense for the direction the water is headed or can be used to show the intensity of it churning like at the base of a waterfall.

Then, of course, don’t forget to add actual highlights to imply the existence of a light source. These usually go about where you’d expect when shading a solid object, but can also follow the curve of your water as needed.

And that’s pretty much it. With these basic principles in mind, I pulled up some more reference photos and had at it with a blend of what I was seeing and what I had learned.

Here’s how it went.

Example Studies

First off, I pulled up some examples from everyone’s favorite franchise where little creatures with magical powers fight a bunch for their trainers, and started with a basic blast of water.

One thing I’d gotten into the habit of doing as I started these drawings was to block out the shape of the water. Previously, I’d talked at length about the shapes water can make depending on what’s happening to it.

Well, in the world of magically controlled water, that does get a little abstract.

For example, the frothing to indicate motion in this example became rings traveling the length of the tube.

Shading implied a dark side and a light side, and that was all that was needed to end up with something that does, in fact, read as a torrent of water.

It’s certainly stylized. I can’t say natural water would have these frothing rings around them. But that’s part of the creative process. Can’t say it’s a technique I’ll apply in my style, but it was an interesting note.

Then I went for another stylized effect with this corkscrew of water. Again, not exactly the most natural thing to see water doing, but the stylistic principles are still mostly at play. There’s no frothing here, just shading to imply dark and light sides with hints of highlighted line art to break apart areas where the water overlaps without shading.

I could probably color this red and make some other color adjustments to make this read like fire as easily as it reads as water. It has that same jagged quality that could make a believable fire vortex.

This next one got a little weird because I was fighting between what I saw and the style choices I was trying to force. It’s a ball of water, but it has churning and depth to it in a way I hadn’t quite experienced yet. This is 100% a stylistic choice and not at all how real water would behave. Yet, with some clever shading and highlighting, it still looks pretty cool.

It just doesn’t leave much to study as far as style goes, and I can’t say I’ll try to mimic something like this in my comic, so I moved on.

I then returned to the classic waterfall. Here the highlights and froth are used in expected ways with a churning area around the base of the waterfall, the circular ripples emanating from the impact area, and a nice stylistic highlighting choice along the length of the waterfall to further imply direction with the V-shaped highlights.

I’d been playing around with some extra shading using soft gradients, though I think my current iteration is too manufactured to read as realistic. Something to keep working on.

Then there’s the water attack that came to define the style choices I’d picked out. Already the base alone implies a direction, but once frothing is added in it gives it a sense of speed. This is coming around fast, and will surely hit its target with enough force to cause some damage.

Threads of frothing connect the major pieces to add visual intrigue, and the shading, again, follows the rule of having a light side and a dark side to the object. Plus, there’s some subtle shading happening around the frothing branches to imply the solidity of these pieces casting shadows into the water.

And, finally, I took it easy with a simple water surface, with some foamy bits on top and dark patches directly beneath. This is a little chunky for my liking, but that was my own fault. I still think it reads well.

But that’s where I stopped in my water studies. At this point, I’d felt comfortable in the principles I wanted to apply to my style. Granted, there’s certainly more practice to be done. For as nice as these are looking, there’s a roughness to them that’s evident to me due to my inexperience.

I’ll definitely be relying on reference photos for a while still before I can start drawing these from my imagination. But now I can look at reference photos and start breaking them down by the base shape, areas of shading and lighting, and features to add direction and intensity.

Testing the Style

With that done, I turned my attention to my own work. Drawing water on a blank canvas is fine and all, but what would this look like in my work? It was time to find out.

I made this picture of Rennen that I’m really proud of. It features his new King’s Sorcerer outfit in color and applies some updated drawing and coloring techniques I’ll be using in the series. I made this as a base so that I could test magical effects. Water would be my first test subject.

Starting with the basics, I created a curving, globby shape for the water. His spread hands give me plenty of room to play with shapes in between.

Then I thought about my shading. Did I want to treat this like a solid object or use the principle of thicker areas of water mean darker patches?

The answer: a little bit of both. My lighting is coming from the upper left, which is implied in the shadows, but I also pulled the shadows into the center of the water where it felt appropriate. This feels both like it’s reacting to light and indicating the depth of the water. I was happy with this.

Then it was time for highlights. This isn’t a violent water attack. It’s gentler than that. So no frothing would be present here. Instead, I added highlights to key areas like where the water is roundest up toward Rennen’s left hand and gave it a sense of lighting and direction with the long highlight traveling up the curve on the side where light would be hitting it.

Finally, I added an outline to the water, which gave it a cartoon-y effect. I could take it or leave it, but I know when I do fire effects in my comic that I'll be using lineart on the fire, so it felt appropriate to do that here, too.

This was looking decent, but I wanted to get a little fancy with it and test the style more. First, I reduced the opacity of the water a little. Now it has a little bit of transparency, which I think looks really good on something that’s more slow-moving like this water effect. I imagine I’ll keep things opaque when drawing more actiony water like waterfalls and attacks, but a bit of transparency works here.

Finally, since this is magically controlled water, I added the subtlest amount of glow to add brightness and visual intrigue. I could take it or leave it, but it’s definitely something I’ll be playing with in the comic.

And there it is. One finished water effect. I’m pretty happy with it. I think this is heading in a direction where it nicely toes the line between realistic and stylized while fitting within the style of my world.

With that, all that’s left to do is keep up the practice in the background and continue to learn through reference photos. But I’m certainly feeling a lot more confident about my ability to render the big water scene in the first chapter.

That’s where I’ll leave things off. Look forward to seeing the final form of my water style in the comic! Now to wrap up with the project of the week.

Project of the Week

For this week, I’ve been working dedicatedly on my sketches for the first chapter of The Chosen One’s Mentor. The sketch phase is what I get into after I’ve completed the storyboards, set up my comic file, and gotten my text in place.

Now, there’s something important to note about the sketch phase which is something that has hampered many an artist’s final piece: refining the sketch is probably the most important step in the artmaking process.

A lot of artists suffer from the problem that their sketch, while loose and gestural, looks really good, but once they try to use it to do lineart, the lineart looks…not nearly so good.

This is because if your sketch is too, well, sketchy, you’ll almost never be able to land on the exact line placement you need to make your finished lineart look half as good as the sketch. This was something I’d experienced and suffered from for a while until I figured out the solution: get your sketch as close to what the lineart will look like as possible.

I’ve been keeping that in mind while I work. I’ve kept my sketches as clean as possible. It helps that I often use 3D models to perfect my proportions and posing, but that just gets the basics down. Eyes, hair, clothes, facial expressions, these all need to be rendered with good old fashioned skill.

So here’s a sneak peek at some of the sketches I’ve made this week. I’m feeling really good about them, and I hope that my final lineart will keep the level of quality I’m getting here.