How to Draw Water in Black & White

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French from JayFrenchStudios.com. Today I'm going to show you how to draw water in black and white. What we're going to start with is some simple water and that's a, let's say we've got a leaf here with some droplets on it. That kind of the easiest bodies of water because they're very simple, they're just spheres, some dew drops on a leaf. You get your ovals in to where you know what you're working with then and give some shading to your main subject till you have a medium grade. So everything about the water will show up. But water is essentially all about light. It is the light it reflects it is the light it shows through. Which of course, all art is based on that. So know that we've got this basic concept, we've got a couple of veins on the leaf because that will come in when we get to our details. Now, essentially, from where I've drawn this so far, our light source is coming from the top left. So what we want is a hard shadow. Now, if you're doing this in color, of course this is all about doing it in black and white, but if you are doing it in color you would not use absolute black, you'd just use a dark tone of what's underneath. In this case it would be green because it's a leaf. Then you leave a white edge around that, the edge facing the light source. Fill in the medium tone, which is actually picking up what's underneath, and then add some of the details we have underneath. Here we have a vein that is coming right across this droplet, so we'll warp it and make it get fat as well. This will happen on all these, using our white, we'll do that here as well and this one's right across the mid seam. And you get the warp and that gives you the realistic effect of water. Water droplets and so will actually also leave a bit of shadow. Now, I'm going to give you a quick overview of how to draw larger bodies of water. Because when you're dealing in black and white, you don't have the colors. The colors that the water will pick up. Usually a larger body of water such as a lake, or a pond, or a river, is going to, or an ocean, you're not going to see what's underneath it like you will see through a glass of water or a small droplet. Something as large of a body as that, you're not going to see what's through it or on the other side of it, but you are going to see mostly just then, therefore, reflection. The area around it. If we have a little coastline here, let's say we have a tree, some mountains in the distance. This is why you get the the big bucks here. And, we've got, you know in the foreground, we've got some cattails or something. Some weeds. This is a small stream with some mountains way in the distance, here. OKay. Essentially, for your water, you want to first show ripples around objects. This is fairly still water I'm showing, this is a lake. Ripples at the edge of the coast, or edge if it's a pond. And then you want to show reflection. Now, every object that you'll see will be reflected but will be distorted. So feel free to use squigglier lines, make it squatter usually. You'll see some of these mountains. We'll assume that these mountains are going to have some details on them, something we can show. And that will give you the impression of your water even in black and white. And there you have what will look like water in black and white."