How to Make Water Bubbles in Illustrator

Even the most novice illustrator realistic water bubbles to an Illustrator image. You don't have to paint the individual bubbles and add shading and highlights; that could take forever. Create a custom scatter brush to paint dozens of bubbles at once.

Instructions

1. Draw or import your water source onto the bottom layer. You can use a water glass, bottled water or even an aquarium. Lock the layer to avoid making changes to the base image.

2. Create a new layer named "water." Make sure it's the active layer by checking for a square next to the layer name in the layers palette.

3. Select the paintbrush tool. Choose the 3-point round brush from the brushes palette. Set the fill to empty and the stroke to white. Paint a stroke inside the globe area.

4. Convert your stroke to a scatter brush. Choose "New Brush" from the brushes palette options menu and select "New Scatter Brush" as your new brush option. A dialog will appear allowing you to customize your new brush settings.

5. Change all of the scatter brush options from "Fixed" to "Random" and adjust them until the dots begin to look like snow (the wider the ranger in the scatter settings, the better). Paint bubbles to fill your water (don't worry if you paint outside the water area).

6. Use the pen tool to create a shape that matches the water at the top of the water layer. Select the layer in the layers palette and choose the "Make/Release Clipping Mask" icon. The bubbles outside the water will disappear

7. Add dimension to the bubbles. Select every bubble subpath and choose the "Inner Glow" effect with a 50 percent multiply mode using black and 1 pixel blur from the edge. Change the layer blend mode to "Hard Light" and reduce the opacity to blend the bubbles into the water.