Free Tutorials on How to Draw Water With Prismacolor Pencil

Video transcription

Hi, I'm Aaron, a graduate of University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I've got my BFA in drawing and painting and today I'm going to show you how to draw water using prismacolor pencils. For more precise erasing you can use a vinyl eraser. You'll need a good pencil sharpener that's capable of handling colored pencils. You're always going to start with the lightest tones for drawing water and move to darker later. With prismacolor pencils it's hard to remove all the pigment even with the best eraser. Now what I'm going to start to do once I've built up enough tone is actually leave a small channel of lighter color in the middle and that's going to be where the sun will be reflecting or the moon actually will be reflecting against the water. So when I go down to this next tone, this next color is Mediterranean blue which is very appropriate. I'm going to be mainly working with two halves of the picture plane from this point on. The tendency will be for the back against the horizon where the sky meets the water to be the darkest. The only place where it will be the brightest is right where the sun will be hitting, right in the center of your plane. Another thing with reflection is as we get closer and move towards the front of the picture plane, the reflection will appear wider and that's just because of the way that your eye works like a camera. It's not actually that the rays of the sun get bigger as they hit us. What we're also going to start thinking about is where the waves break so now we can take our eraser and we're going to take away some of the pigment and horizontal lines that actually will bend up toward the end of the page to kind of get a sense of roundness that happens when a wave crashes. Now I'm going to move on to a little but of green tones. The green will be most prevalent towards the back of the horizon where the sky meets the water. Alright now I'm going to start filling in a little heavier, getting some real color in there. I'm going back to one of the more medium tones of blue, actually the second color that I started working with. I'm keeping out of the way of those swelts that I created with my eraser. The next step that I'm going to take is going to be to start to address the wave situation to actually define those as forms. So the tops are kind of foamy. They bubble up a little bit when that wave really crashes against the sand. Another thing that you will notice as the wave gets closer to you it will send spray and you can draw a little bit of that in. Now what I'm going to do is I'm noticing that the tones are too even. Let's take an Indigo blue which is the darkest blue and I'm just going to fill in the background a little bit making sure that that always stays the darkest. You can start to bring out some definition of the forms of the spray. Now one more time I'm going to take the eraser and go through. This does a combination of things. This brings back a little bit of the light that would be coming from your sun or moon reflection and it also blends the tones together. Now another way to blend tones with prisma colors is to take a white pencil and actually change the color in a small way. Now I'm going to come back in with a medium dark blue and again I'm just going to darken those forms underneath the wave break just to let you know that it is a solid, well technically a solid mass that's rolling forward over the top of the water. Making diagonal lines even if they're just suggestive lines inside of your shading and rendering, it will make things appear dramatic and exciting. So, hopefully some of these tips can give you a hand. This has been Aaron Wemer showing you how to draw water with primsmacolor pencils.