 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins, and I really love painting water, but sometimes it can be a little challenging. So in this tutorial, I'm calling 12 easy tips for painting water. I hope to unlock some of the mysteries. You will learn about painting reflections, painting still water, painting moving water, a little bit about painting oceans and waves, and so much more in an easy to follow format. So come on in the studio with me and join the fun as we learn 12 easy tips for painting water. I'd also really appreciate it if you would take a moment right now to like, subscribe, and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. And I'm able to keep these free lessons coming because of the support from my patrons on my Patreon page. If you would like to consider becoming a patron, it's only $5 a month and you get extra goodies and extra content. A quick example of that extra content can be seen here. My patron will receive a guide with detailed descriptions on this tutorial along with a quiz and homework assignment. So we're gonna have fun patrons. Let me talk a little bit about my supplies. You can see I have a large piece of drawing paper. This is Strathmore 500 series charcoal paper, and I'm using this large sheet just to be able to show you all 12 examples on one page. But a product that I recommend for pastel sketching that's more affordable than some of the sanded papers is this Strathmore toned gray paper. I use this all the time. I use it when I'm doing exercises or examples for my patrons. And again, it's affordable. I have this on my Amazon shop and I'll provide a link in the description of this video as well. And I'll be using a combination of pastels as I go through these different examples. So just use what you have. By the way, this isn't medium exclusive. These same principles work for acrylic oil painting. Sometimes watercolor painting, you have to apply them differently with respect to lightness and darkness when you apply your lights and your darks. But most mediums, these principles will be the same. All right. So what am I doing now? And this is tip number one, by the way, pull reflections down. This is the simplest of the 12 tips. And basically all you need to keep in mind is that reflections tend to pull downward. So you can actually just take something. I'm going to talk later about the values of how reflections change, but something of a similar value and pull those reflections down. And because reflections are often, if it's a dark reflection, they're a little bit lighter in value and they're not quite as detailed. They're a little fuzzier. They don't have sharp edges. And because of those principles of actual reflections, you can use a blending tool. Now, if you're using soft pastel, this works well because I'm using drawing paper. I'm using a chamois cloth. This works really well on an unsanded surface. I often use other blending tools if I'm working on a sanded surface. If you've followed my videos long, you've seen other methods that I've used. A piece of pipe foam insulation works well. But this immediately creates the idea of kind of that watery, fuzzy reflection. But the general rule here is to pull down reflections. Now that was very easy, right? Let's talk about tip number two. I'm calling this one opposite values. And by the way, I don't have any reference images to share with you because I'm just doing all of these out of my head and keeping it very basic and simplistic. Many of these will be real time, but I'm going to have to speed some of them up so this video isn't so long, but I'll give plenty of commentary. All right, so I'm just creating a little bit of a tree line in the distance. And I'll do, of course, the same example of tip number one of pulling reflections down. But the point of tip number two is that when you are painting reflections, in general, items that are darker in value will be lighter in value, just a tad in their reflection. Now I'm doing just like I did in tip number one, I'm using the same value of the pastel that I'm using, which happens to be a Prismacolor new pastel. It's a harder pastel. And so actually by blending the pastel, like I did in the first one, it actually does very subtly lighten the value a bit. Here are some images that really reveal this fact about our physical world and reflections. Light elements look a little darker in a reflection. And you can really see it in these light colored boats and their reflections on the water, how they're a little bit darker in value. So that's why I call this remember opposite values with reflections. And this is, you know, just a typical rule that will really help you in painting reflections that look more believable. And this doesn't just apply to elements sitting on the water like a boat. This also will be represented the same way with the sky. You know, the sky is typically the lightest thing in our landscape or seascape or whatever kind of painting. And we have a tendency to think, well, let's paint the same reflective colors of the sky into the water. Not so just as you saw in the white boat example, the light colored sky will almost always be reflected into the water just a little bit darker. You can see that in this photo, not only with the white clouds, but also with the blue sky above. So I try to keep that in mind as I'm painting. So I grabbed a pastel that was just a little bit darker in value. I'm talking just very minuscule amounts little bit darker than the colors that I used in the sky. And this is part of another tip that's coming up, but water is flat. Okay, so while we pull our reflections down, that's because we're going to be glazing horizontal strokes in a flat way over the top of the water that creates that real sense of flatness of water. Water seeks its own level. That means that whatever you pour water into, it's going to flatten out. I don't care if you turn the container, the water is going to find level. That's why they use levels in construction. It's a cool law of physics that we can use to our advantage when getting things straight. So keep that in mind. Water when you're painting water is going to be flat. Now, of course, there are times when we have ripples in water and disturbances on water, and I'll be talking more about both of those principles and upcoming tips, the flatness of the water and the movement of the water. But keep in mind for this one tip, tip number two, that values are going to be opposites. Dark elements are typically a little lighter in the water. Light elements are typically a little darker in the water. And now we move to tip number three. We're going to talk about the height of reflections. I often talk about how things are mirrored, but I would like you to consider this principle when painting. When water is flat, the height of the objects are typically about the same height. When water is moving, reflections are a bit elongated. Consider the photo on the right. Now, I know those pine trees are tall, but as the ripples move the water, the reflections seem to stretch out just a little bit longer than the actual element above the water. So let me create an example. Now, I'm not going to make you guys go through every time I create the tree line and pull the shadows down. Basically, all of these tips are kind of building upon each other. So what I've done here is I have created, I know I'm going to create water that's moving or has wind and disturbances on it. So I'm pulling my shadows down and I created them just a little bit longer than the actual height of the tree above the horizon line. Longer than the ones in the previous. Tip number two, if you can see. And I know that I am going to be breaking up the water in the ripples or the bands by these horizontal marks, but I am going to give them a bit more movement wave. And while it's flat, the water is still flat. We know that some of the waves or the ripples are going to move a bit up and down ebb and flow. So that's why I am creating my lines a little bit more of a zigzaggy pattern. And what they're going to do is they're going to break up that reflection. And I think I'm not a scientist in this, but I think maybe the reason why the reflections appear longer is we've got water in in the little waves that come up. They're higher. And I think they're catching some of the reflection of the items above the water that appears to make them longer. In other words, the water is reaching up a little higher and catching those reflections. So again, if any of you guys are physics majors or anything, you can let me know if there's any logic to that. That's my my brain, my thinking on that. Okay, so that's general tip number three. Moving water usually has reflections that are a tad longer, which is a perfect segue into tip number four, talking about moving water. I'm going to give you three little examples of water that is still versus water that has a gentle movement and then water that has quite a bit of wind kicking up. These are like little dock posts sticking up above the horizon line. In the first one, the water is going to be flat. And I did a reflection similar to the first two where I just kind of mirrored the image. Now, if I know my water ahead of time, I know my water is going to be have a little movement. I'm going to create the reflection a little bit more broken as in the second case. The third case, the water is really moving. We're going to have more separation, quick little lines, and in general, more energetic, quick little strokes. And now I'm going to add a little bit of color and I'm also going to add some of that water. Now, for the first one, the water is flat, remember? We're going to have just more flat horizontal lines, just like we did the first one. The second one I just did, they're a little more zigzaggy and broken. The third one, they're more crisp little shorter strokes with just minimal little zigzags, little kind of quick broken gestural marks. And I'm just going to go ahead and add in a little bit of the sky and some of the sky color being reflected on the water as well. Keeping with the same theme, I chose a couple of colors that are a little bit darker in value than my sky color. And I am just kind of quickly grabbing what I have near me for my pastels. And going along with the same idea of still water with really horizontal flat strokes, gently moving water with a little bit of movement, and the very quick windy water with more of the sharp little peaks onto where the water is kicking up a little bit from the wind. And I do apologize for my shaky easel. I did try to hold it down most of the time. And now we're moving on to tip number five, which is reflections are not always mirrored. I've been talking a lot and I share in my videos a lot how you just basically mirror the reflection from what's above the horizon you mirror it. Well, this works out a lot better if items are further away. There are oftentimes when you are in close proximity to an element that's on the water and in these cases or the element is sitting right on the water as in the case of this little rock, then we are not going to have an exact mirror of the image. And by the way, a good way to do this until you get used to doing it from a perspective of just painting it is to turn your painting sideways. You can see the mirrored elements easier that way. But in this case, if we were to reproduce just a mirrored image of this rock, it would come off as artificial. And I'm purposely going to lighten the top part of this rock so that you can more clearly understand the point. I mean it really is logical. For example, let's say there's some moss on the top of this rock and it's a little bit lighter. The sun is shining on it. And the reflection of the rock in the water, the top of the rock is not going to be reflected into the water. There's no way the top of that rock could be observable in the reflection. Now a perfect example of this is birds. Consider the reflection of this seagull. By the way, I think I got this photo from artist Lorie McNee. She has an article on reflections and I thought this bird photo really revealed this principle. Notice how you're seeing more of the underside of the bird than a mirror image reflection. So keep that in mind when you're painting that often if things are sitting close to the water or you're close to that element, the top sides are not really going to be reflected into the water at all. So think about seeing the underneath sides of things when they are close to the water as in this rock. And I'm speeding this part up because it's the same principles we talked about before, the flatness glazed over the water, the sky element being a little bit darker in value than it is in the sky. All right now we are going on to tip number six. And we've already touched on this one a bit. The fact that water is flat, but I'm going to give you some more tips on how to render that in certain scenes. I've divided my drawing section here into two sides. One's going to show what not to do on the left and one's going to show a better alternative on the right. Now I am going to do what I guess I would consider a river or a marsh scene. And in this case I'm doing curvy lines. And this is something I often tell artists not to do when even painting roads and things. More geometric edges and shapes are way more artistic. So I'm trying to draw a little arrow there. This means that this is going to give the appearance when you create these shapes that the water is going uphill. And water just doesn't do that. So it is better to create more edges rather than curves when we're creating waterways. Now I'm going to alter this one a bit. I decided not to make it a river. This kind of has the perspective of us of the viewer being in an aerial position. So I'm going to make this more of a marsh. And I'm going to show you how the banks of the marsh should be a bit more horizontal rather than curvy and reaching upwards. I've zoomed in here so you can see a little bit better. I've got my banks of my marshes more horizontal and the reflections are going to pull down just like we talked about in example number one. I've got my water is going horizontal as well. It is more flat. I'm having this as calm water. So we've got this flat water adding a little bit of greenery to the tops and a little bit of water. We're going to talk about this little tip in one coming up. A little bit of movement on the water here. And this creates more of the feeling of a flatness of water and what it actually does like we mentioned before. It seeks its own level and it doesn't go uphill. The only time water goes in a direction other than flat is if it's going downhill on a waterfall or something like that. So now I'm just speeding this up so you can see how amateurish this will look if you paint with these poor principles I guess I should say. This definitely has more of a feeling of an aerial view. Now it might look a little bit more like this a river if you were up in a helicopter but this is not how it's going to look in your typical landscape where your your view is from someone's perspective looking at it from the land. So keep that in mind when creating water that is meandering through marshes or rivers to avoid that false illusion of water going uphill. And now we're halfway done moving on to tip number seven which is creating a ripple at the water's edge. Often there is a little break in the water line right where the water will meet the water's edge or objects that are in the water and even though it's such a subtle little effect it really does give that impression of water and the believability of water. So as I've said before these principles all are building upon one another. You can see me using a little bit of all of the elements I've already talked about before pulling down the reflections glazing over the horizontal flatness of the water and now I'm going to be adding that little ripple. I'm using a white pastel. I don't often use white but I thought this would show up best. I would usually use a value that's not stark white. It would be a light value but have a little bit of color in it that would complement the scene. But all I'm doing is creating little kind of horizontal bands kind of circling around elements where it feels like the water would be moving maybe a bit. And it's just really interesting how something so simple can create something believable. And my line at the back it was hard. These are small paintings so it was hard to get it as small as it probably should be but I think you can get the idea. Also break up the line as I did in the bank to the upper right there. The one on the left was a little bit too continuous. It always looks more believable when you just give a little broken line versus one that is so uniform and consistent. Also sometimes there are little individual grasses maybe just peeking up through and over the water. I put a couple of them there. Here's a little better idea. And remember that whenever you add these they will also have reflections especially if the water is still and they will also have sometimes that little break in the water. That's going to delineate what's above the water and below the water. It really does help to create that illusion of flat water. Now on to tip number eight and I wasn't even sure what to call this one. I'm going to call it water disturbance. And it's a way you can create the illusion of water more artistically and believable when you create a little slight disturbance. Now I'm not talking about water that has a lot of waves or movement but often in water that's fairly still it can have bits of disturbance on it. It can be from a little slight breeze just catching the water at a certain angle. It can be from little creatures flying and flitting and hitting the water. And often those little disturbance lines can really help to give some interest to your water. And also provide a focal point element. I talk often about focal point elements and how it can strengthen your composition. And one is directional. You're literally using elements to point your viewer to where you want your focal point to be or an area of interest in your painting. Now I had a little bit of those disturbance lines when I first started introducing this principle. But I wanted to go ahead and develop the painting a little bit further. And again there's no sense in me taking you guys through the whole process just to get to one tip. So I'm darkening a little bit of the the water and I wanted like we said in one of the principles is your water is typically and your reflections in your water are typically going to be a little darker than what's in your sky. So I'm just giving it a little bit more color. I used kind of a monochromatic palette of burgundies and just some cool reds. And so now I'm going to show you once again how creating some slight lines of disturbance can actually strengthen the composition and draw the viewer into your painting. And I may have gotten a little bit too many of these lines. But I'm once again going to do the little element that I talked about. And the last tip is create the little disturbance lines right along the shore. So this is just a really easy simple little strategy that can give a little more life and interest to your painting when it's a flat body of water. And we are moving right along here. We are at tip number nine. And this has to do with oceans. As a matter of fact the next three will have to do with oceans. And I'm going to specifically talk in this one about creating a believable ocean with respect to the horizon line. In my Patreon group I have the wonderful opportunity to critique a lot of my patrons paintings. We have something once a month called Critique My Painting. And they submit artwork one piece each month that they'd like an opportunity for critique. And while I can't get to all of them everybody loves it because they learn something no matter whose painting I critique. And quite often I have had artists who have submitted paintings that are of an ocean and everybody is always so grateful when I share this very simple tip that really does help make a more believable ocean. So here's the tip. Oh and I am I'm using my little blending tool again here to just blend. And as I've said before these are all just out of my head so I'm just really trying to paint something that can represent the principle I'm trying to share. Here's the tip. Make sure your horizon line is straight. You've got to have it super level. Now I often will get a straight edge such as this ruler and I found that I like to draw the line under the ruler if I've already drawn or painted the sky and the ocean. For some reason it just seems to look a little bit better. Now the horizon line is always in an ocean almost always just a little dark. That's why I did it a little darker and then I softened it with that actual pastel I'm using there. It was a little bit lighter blue and I do have a video where I talk a little bit more about this technique and it was from a beautiful trip to St. Pete or should I say beautiful St. Pete beach Florida my husband and I took oh gosh this was years ago we haven't gone anywhere fun in a long time. So I use the same strategy so check that video out it will be in the description of this video. And so when you're next time you're at the beach or look at an ocean photo take a look at that it really is a little bit darker at the horizon line and it's very flat. And now let's talk a little bit about ocean waves. Now this could be a very extensive description of the various ways you can paint waves but like the title of this video says these are 12 easy tips for painting water. So I'm going to try to break this down to be very simple for you. However if you would like more on this topic painting waves and water I do have a video where I go into a lot more about painting water ocean water and waves and I'm going to include this and other water painting lessons in the description of this video. So if you want to get a little bit more than these easy tips find those links in the description of this video. And here we go this is going to be a really hopefully easy description of waves in general. I like to give the comparison to or the similarity of how I recommend painting other things in landscape painting. The same rules are going to apply things that are pardon me while I develop this painting. Things that are in the foreground they're going to be larger actually you know because things are closer they're bigger and they're going to gradually decrease in size in the distance. So wave peaks and things will be larger in the foreground. They'll get tighter together and smaller in the background. Things in the foreground are typically darker in value and they get lighter in value in the distance. The same thing typically applies with waves. Also colors tend to be warmer in the foreground cooler in the background. Keep your subject matter in mind with all of these things but what I'm doing now is I just developed a few colors but notice I put in some darker values and that's kind of where some of my wave bands are going to be. Now keep in mind too with respect to waves they are going to have shadows where the light is not hitting them and in this case the light is like behind. So it's going to cast a shadow on that front side of the waves and so I'm adding my lighter values to the peaks and I'm using also kind of zigzaggy strokes. You don't want them all the typical cliche waves of just peaks up and down and as I've said numerous times now I'm not working from a reference photo so I'm imagining some of these waves. A reference photo is obviously a great guide not that you have to be you know just so stuck to your reference image but if you keep these general things in mind you should be able to paint believable waves. Now I'm getting my values as I'm going into the distance and my colors they're going to be less intense and a little bit lighter in value a little more neutral in color as things go into the distance I like to keep my more vibrant color a little bit more in the foreground. When I say foreground I want to make sure I don't give the impression that it's right at the edge of the foreground. It's best to keep the the immediate edge of your paintings all the way around actually a little bit more subtle to bring the viewer's eye in. Now here's back to that other trick I am going to actually remember how I said I like to do it on the other side well this time I'm adding I had already added a dark band but I want to straighten it out so I'm using the ruler underneath to add a little bit of light to the top and I find it creates a more believable straight edge. So now you can see we've got and I'm going to soften that up a little bit the the background's a little bit dark or the back horizon line. Now I'm just going to give some focal point interest by adding a few other little highlights on just a few of the waves just to kind of lead the viewer in and to explore on into the distance. Also because I was painting this as deep ocean water notice there's no shoreline that's why the water is a deep blue usually deeper water is going to have deeper color darker value and a bit more of that bluish tone and if water is a bit more shallow often there is a bit more green in the water lakes rivers and streams also have a little bit more of a a greenish hint to them. Now we're on our third and final ocean painting tip and this is going to be tip number 11 thin waves and sand in this painting that I created of a tropical beach scene you can see that we have the normal ocean to the right and then there's a little thin wave kind of just lapping up onto the shore but the sand is also you can tell that it's a little bit wet. So I'm going to show you how to create that effect hopefully in a very simple way but once again bear with me as I develop this painting a little bit to be able to get to the main point. Now this is more of a Caribbean scene in my mind anyway and the water is more shallow hence the little bits of green and more of a turquoise color. All right now I am putting this back to real time what I'm doing now is I'm developing that foreground wave that is kind of lapping over the sand but I'm keeping a division sort of right now between the water and the land on the land I put a bit of light and a little bit of tan to kind of give an idea of sand. Now I'm getting in a little bit of the dark more brown sand in there just kind of flitting it in here and there and I'm just ever so slightly giving a layer of that color into the little bit of the darker area and so I continue to develop this to give the feeling of sand but the goal is to eventually have some of that wave underneath the main water part of the wave to be very thin and I've found that that thinner wave it's going to be a combination of water and land so thin so I'm giving it a darker wet feel of sand color to begin with. Now some of this is going to be the thin wave and some of this is going to be the wet sand so eventually I'm going to give a little delineation between the wet sand and the thin wave. Now how I'm going to do that right now is I'm going to start giving a little edge very thin little edge of where that thin wave is going to be lapping over the sand. Now the reason there was that little darker edge is it's actually a shadow okay it's kind of like a drop shadow um on that um little thin wave because there's a teeny little bit of height to it okay so now I'm going to develop a little bit more of the main water that's that's uh I guess you could say deeper it's a little thicker with water and now I'm just glazing a little bit of that color very lightly over the thin wave. Now what I'm doing is I'm going in and developing the wet sand. I am making a little it looks a little too dark right now but I'm doing that purposely and I'm just blending it in so it looks like really soft wet sand it's usually very flat almost shimmery. I'm giving that thin wave a little bit more of an edge it's going to not show as much in the distance of course because it's far away. I'm developing the sand a little bit more with sand colors and eventually I'm going to just gently merge the two together and because and I forgot I need to develop the sky a little bit so I went ahead and gave some sky color and I often like to use that color I just had right there. It's sort of a lavender between a lavender and a periwinkle color and I find that when I add a thin layer of that on top of the wet sand what it does is it cools it off just a bit. The sand being wet is going to be a darker value but because it has a little water on top of it it's a little cooler also so I just find that's a neat combination for creating the illusion of wet sand so I developed this a little bit further just think of it as thin layers of color just lapping over the shore and of course I added a few little dark elements for interest. And that's the final tip for painting ocean scenes and now we're going to move on to our final tip number 12 which is painting things underneath the water and there's some really simple little strategies you can use for that as well. I have another video to enhance this tip and I call it Dance of the Koi. It was a painting that I did of some koi fish at a local beautiful garden in our area and in this painting I created the illusion of koi fish being underneath the water. Now some of them had their heads sticking out of the water so we're going to talk about the technique to achieve that illusion and here is what will hopefully be my very simple explanation for this. Once again the same old same old but I am going ahead and creating the items that will be under the water before I create the water. Now when you're dealing with things under the water usually when you can see things they're usually close to you in very shallow water and thus the water is also often a bit greenish in tint. Now this happens to be kind of a lake scene and so we're basically going to glaze our water on top of our underwater elements. Now they start out a little darker when you put them in but they are gradually going to get a little bit lighter in value and they're also going to get a little bit more subdued. Items under the water have softer edges and they are going to be treat them a little bit like the reflections. They're going to just kind of soften up and be a little diffused. I guess that's the best way to put it. Now I did darken up some of my underwater rocks or whatever those things are under the water as I'm developing my painting but in a minute you'll see me actually glaze even more on the tops of these underwater debris or whatever it is. I was thinking when I was painting this there happens to be a scene that I remembered that has water very similar to this. Oh I have another video of something similar let me show you that video. This is actually the reference image I was thinking of. It's in Fort DeSoto, Florida, a beautiful park and there was some shallow water with some debris kind of right underneath the surface of the water and I did an experiment with this painting. I actually tried to use watercolor to create the debris. It kind of worked. I wanted it to look soft like it was underwater. Added a few more dark elements and as you're going to see in this little example is the same idea. You're just basically creating what's under the water first and then glazing the watercolor over top of it horizontally. Now in my little tutorial which I will also include in the description of this video I actually did lay down some of the color of the water first before adding the elements that would be under the water and there you have it. 12 easy tips for painting water. I really hope you learned something. Please comment and let me know what you learned and anything else you'd like to share. I love hearing from you guys. If you're a patron of mine you will be getting your extra content over on the Patreon page and I can't wait to see what you do with these exercises. All right everyone. God bless and happy painting.