Acrylic Painting Tutorial How to Paint Realistic Water

I have exactly one hour to record this voiceover, so we're just gonna get right to it. Please ignore any of my word stumblings, because it's probably just gonna happen. This is an acrylic painting I did on a wood panel of some pretty sparkly water, of course, because that's one of my favorite things to paint. Now, this is definitely more of an advanced painting, so you beginner painters out there that really want to give this a try, I highly, highly recommend that you do so, but maybe give yourself a little bit of grace when giving it a try. I tried out these Craftamo bamboo brushes for the first time while doing this painting, and I really like them. I'm gonna leave the link in the description in case you want to give them a try too. So as my reference for this painting, I used this photo I took at the lake this summer, which was so, so, so beautiful. I love the composition, the colors. Feel free to take a screenshot of that so you can have it up next to you while you're painting, or just follow along with me. Whatever you want to do does not matter. So what I'm doing here first is I'm mixing up a neutral kind of blue color, and when I say neutral, I mean that it's not too dark and not too light, because what I want to do here is be able to have a base color to work on top of. The way I do this painting method is that I build up my highlights and my shadows on top of a color that was already there. The reason I love doing this first is because, one, it gives my whole painting a nice cohesive color feel, because some of that blue color comes in from behind the layers you put on top, and because it is there already and you do see some of it coming through, you don't get a lot of those white areas if you have transparent paints, and I like to use transparent acrylic paints because I can get some of that blending, quote-unquote, happening by having some transparency in my colors that I'm layering on top of each other. You'll see as I go along. So what I did next is I mixed up a lighter blue color. This is going to be part of my highlight, not my full highlight, not the brightest my highlights are going to be, but kind of like a slightly darker than what my full highlight is going to be, just so I can sketch out where my highlight pieces in my painting are. I'm freehanding this. You don't have to freehand. You can use a gridding system. You can use a tracing system. I really like freehanding a lot of my paintings, and the method I use to freehand so I can try and get as accurate of ratios to my reference photo and my real painting as possible is I kind of gauge where the edges of my bigger shapes are so I can see that on my reference photo that separation between the highlights and the shadows is about halfway between the painting on the left side and then angles up just slightly. So I make that little wavy line slightly on... Oh, it's hard to explain. Right in the middle on the left side and then curving slightly up to be just higher than the middle on the right side. It's kind of mathematical the way I do this. I just gauge. I'm like, oh, this side has two thirds of the way up. This is where the highlight starts. This side, it's one third of the way up. And I kind of just sketch those little lines out. It's tricky. So this is just my method for doing it. You don't have to do it that way. Gritting's great. Tracing's great. Don't feel like you have to freehand. So as I'm doing this, I'm taking this light blue color and I'm sketching out, as you can see, everywhere where my highlights are. The background color we had put originally is kind of holding the place of the shadows for right now. And I really like to start with the highlights because those are the really, really big focus of the water in my eyes. So I want to get the shapes of that all set up before I go in with any details. And this way, too, as the first layer of me just sketching this out, I can totally paint all over it. Just as soon as I realize I don't like something, I just paint right over it. And that's the beauty of acrylics because they dry so fast. It's so lovely. You can see here I've got most of my highlights sketched out. What I'm doing is I've added a little bit of water to my paint and that way it has a little more transparency to it. So in areas that I feel like the highlights aren't as prominent and they're starting to blend a little bit into the shadowed areas, that transparency of the extra water in my paint helps that blended gradient happen just slightly. Instead of trying to blend my acrylic paints while they're wet on my canvas, which is just a method that does not really work out for me. It works for some people, doesn't work for me with acrylics, works with oils for me, but does not work with acrylics. What I do for blending is instead add a bunch of color layers to add the subtlety of the gradients and then only have very slight color shifts, aka adding slightly more white or slightly more blue the next time I go into that gradient layer to achieve that blended look. So now that we have all of our highlights outlined, don't worry if they're not perfect. They're just going to give you a gist and you're going to layer more on top. What we're going to do now is add our quote unquote shadow areas and some of these aren't a super dark shadow. You can see I mixed up this greenish color that's matching my reference photo as close to possible and it's actually a little bit lighter than what my neutral color in the background is. That's okay. That's totally fine. When I say shadow and highlight, it's just the bulk of what the brightest contrast is and the bulk of what the darker contrast is. So I have this little green mixed up. Also, I know I haven't talked about the exact colors I'm using for this painting. I recommend just using whatever primaries you have. Red, yellow, green. Uh, green isn't a primary color. What the hell? Red, yellow, blue and white and using those colors to mix up what you need. I'll leave the exact colors I use in the description below, but you don't need the exact colors that I use. Don't worry about that. Use what you have. It'll be totally fine. It's more about how you use your colors than what colors you're using, especially when you're a beginner. So as I'm going along, I'm taking this green color and I'm filling in all the areas where I feel like this lightish tealy green color is on my piece, which is all the areas that aren't the highlights, right? I'm slightly tweaking this green as I move along, maybe adding a little bit of light blue or a little bit of dark blue just to shift it enough where it's got a subtle transition to the next color that I'm moving to in the dark areas. You can see it's like just subtle enough. It is a very similar color, but it's going to help with that blending. I slowly change those colors as I'm moving through the water, especially with these shadows, to get those blended areas so it doesn't look like just big block of dark green, big block of light green. There's a transition period that I use with the colors. I'm always shifting the colors. I don't mix up a color and then just leave it as is. It's always moving around for me. If I'm doing that with oils, it's kind of different because I can take different areas and they'll stay wet for a while. Acrylics dry up so fast, so I have to be constantly in motion with my colors. I'm in a little bit of a darker green here as I'm moving up in my painting because my shadows are a little bit darker, a little more contrasty on the waves of the top part of my painting. As you're working through the additions of these shadows, really pay attention to the wave shapes, the teardrops of the shadows, the streaks of the light. The shapes of the waves are really what bring it to life. The color is obviously a very important part, but it's really the shape of the organic motion of the wave that really adds that realistic effect to it. Frankly, it's very hard. It's very hard to get used to how those wave shapes look naturally and how you're able to translate this image that is, when you see it in real life, constantly in motion into a single fraction of a second. That's not really how our brains work when we're drawing something, especially from life, which is why we use reference photos, right? It's a single fraction of a moment. But to get it to look like, if you were to unpause this photograph, this painting, and to see it in real life, it would be in motion. The shapes are the most important part. So be kind on yourself when you're working through that. Know that figuring out those shapes is really, really hard. Pay as close attention as you can. Get as much detail and intricacy in the subtle curves and the points and the shapes as you can. But know that it takes time to learn how to make waves look like waves. So the more you paint, the better it's going to get. I promise. Don't stress too much about it. So now that I've got the bulk of my shadow blocking, just the basic colors that I'm going to then be able to work on top of done, I'm starting to add some more of the subtleties of the color in the transitions between the highlights and the contrasting part of our water. Some of the areas between our water are going to be really sharp. There's going to be sharp lines where we're not going to want very much blending at all. And there's going to be some parts that are usually the bottom part where the shadow is starting to curve into the highlight that are going to need more blending. And so the way I do this, again, is I just subtly change my color. So I'm finding an in-between between that dark green and that light blue. I'm literally mixing the two different colors together. And I'm taking a nice flat brush that has a wide base, making sure I'm using just the line part. It's like I'm drawing little lines on there. And I'm adding in the blend in the transition areas that need it. Make sure you're looking at your reference photo and noticing where there is a stark contrast, a more rigid line between your highlights and your darks. And when there is some blending needed, make sure you're paying attention to where that is. It's not between everything. It's just certain areas. It almost like skips a line. Here, I'm adding a little bit of a lighter green, some areas that I missed on my quote-unquote shadow area, taking my time, adding the subtleties, adding a little more blue to the green. This is the part of the painting where I've got the foundation pretty much fully done. This is what the base of our painting is, honestly. And this is the hardest part, making sure that we have the solid foundation of our painting totally done. The next part, way more fun when we start to get to add the details, the sparkles, the subtleties, and the highlights. This foundational part is the hardest part for sure. But it's done. We're moving on to those little detail parts, like here where I'm adding just a slightly lighter green-blue than what the actual shadow is, to give those areas the feel that slightly more light is hitting that area of that shadow than the deepest part of the shadow. I use the word slightly a lot. There's a lot of slightly happening when you're painting water. The subtleties, again, a word I'm using a lot, they're a huge deal when you're painting water. It's all about the subtleties, because it's fairly simple as far as a painting goes, which seems crazy. I know it looks very detailed and complicated. But if you think about it, it's basically two colors that you're using, a highlight and a shadow. And there's no sky, trees, foreground. It's just a close-up of a singular object. And so you can really dive into the details and the realism and the subtleties of something that's so quote-unquote simple. I know it doesn't feel simple, but there's a lot about water and the close-up of it that is simple. So to make sure it comes off as water and not just like a bunch of blue lines, those subtleties, those intricacies, those simple little shifts are a huge deal on a painting like this. So make sure you're taking your time. You can paint over anything that gets messed up. Literally, do not stress. Do not stress if you make a mistake. That's what acrylics are for. They dry up and you just start all over again. So now that I've added some more of the detail to the shadow parts of my waves, I'm going back in with my highlights, doing the same thing that I was doing with the shadows and creating some more of those blended areas, some of those highlights that maybe just subtly sit on top of the shadows and make sure I'm getting the blending there. And then what I'm doing is I mix up an even lighter highlight than what we'd originally used for our highlights. Remember when I talked about making sure the highlight that we used as the original highlight was just not quite as light as our final highlight is gonna be? Now we're gonna get slightly lighter, not the brightest it's gonna be yet, just slightly lighter, and we're starting to detail out some more of those highlight areas because the highlight is not just a single color. The highlight is reflecting light in a whole bunch of different waves. It's like a mirror that's curved. So it's not just gonna be this bright blue in one area and it's that same bright blue for every single highlight. It's going to be just a little bit different as the water moves and reflects the light differently. Again, pretty complicated. Take your time. Just look for the areas on your reference photo that are brighter than the highlights you'd put originally. The original highlights were the bulk of everything, right? And now you're narrowing that shape down slightly to this slightly brighter highlight. And when we go in with our next set of highlight colors, it's going to be even lighter. Take your time. This is getting to the part of the painting that is very, very detail-oriented. It's the part that is going to show up more on the painting. So what we did originally, the base, now we're kind of painting over. That's part of our guide for what we wanted our painting to look like. Now these details that we're adding on are gonna be the part that people see when they look at our painting. So we wanna make sure we're taking all the time we need, not rushing it. And remember, you can always paint over if you mess something up. I don't know if you can hear it. I have Bindi sleeping in my lap right now, and she's snoring. And I don't know if it's gonna pick up on the audio, but we'll see. We'll see. Everyone's gonna enjoy that. So in this time, I'm just taking what I need to add those highlights. That's really all that's happening here. There's nothing more than that. I'm looking at my reference photo, and I'm adding. You can see me. I don't know if you could see that where I'm using my finger to blend while the paint is still wet. I don't know if that's like a thing other painters do because it's very messy. But sometimes you can see there are areas where I want that really subtle transition between my highlight and my contrasted or my highlight and my shadow areas. And so I just take the tip of my finger and I just rub it out. Really, really subtly. And it creates that blended look that I'm looking for that I couldn't necessarily get with my brush because with my finger I'm picking up some more of that paint as opposed to my brush that kind of just like leaves it there. It's not saying you have to do it. Just saying that I do it. Don't worry about a correct way to paint because I don't know if there's a correct way to paint. I don't think there is. I think everyone can paint whatever way they want. Okay, what I'm doing here I've mixed up kind of a dark teal that's similar to what our shadow color was but instead it's just a little bit darker. Just a little bit because there's a part in our reference photo that sits in the middle of our highlights that's a shape of reflected something. It could be a tree or it could be the water that's shadowed behind it. It's a reflection on the highlighted part just like a mirror would reflect stuff. So it's wavy. It's funky shapes. It doesn't look exactly like what say a tree would like, a bird. Who knows what the reflection is. I think it's just a reflection of the wave behind it but it's like a mirror but if the mirror was super wiggly. So what I'm doing is I'm drawing that on top of the highlighted area of my painting and I'm really using kind of that same method I used from the get-go to freehand. If you had gridded this out or if you'd traced it, you don't have to worry about it but I'm using that method where I'm kind of gauging that say this part of the reflection sits halfway between the top of my highlighted area in the middle and the bottom of my highlighted part in the middle. Oh my god, it's complicated. The way it's very hard to explain the way I choose to freehand a painting. I've got a big background in drawing. That's really growing up most of what I did. It's only in the last like five years or so that I've really got into painting and so I have a lot of history and brainpower devoted to replicating things that I see in real life to paper, canvas, whatever as far as the shape goes. So freehanding is hard. I want to say that. I know I say that for a lot of things. I'm like, this is hard. This is hard. Be gentle on yourself. But it's true. It's true. And the reason I freehand so easy is because from kindergarten I was drawing and I just translated that into my painting life. So no stress. If you can't freehand, give yourself some grace. Lord, give yourself some grace, please. Okay, here you can see around those reflections, those funky little wiggly dark shapes, I'm adding a slightly lighter highlight. Again, I brought that highlight color just up just a little bit because it's slightly lighter there in the middle as I'm moving down my painting. You can see me a lot when I'm painting with acrylics going from the top of my painting, that's where I start and then moving down a lot of times. Sometimes I don't. But the reason I do that is because if I'm not, if I start from the bottom and go up, I can't rest my hand on my canvas. That's one of the amazing things about acrylics too is that because it dries, I can set my hand down on my actual canvas once it's dried, which gives me a lot of control of the details without having to wait for it to dry for days and days and days like you do with oils. So a lot of my oil paintings can sometimes have really beautiful blending but more of an impressionistic kind of feel because I don't want to sit and wait for my painting to be dry to be able to put the next layer on. So I just kind of give it a looser feel because I can't get some of that detail by resting my hand on the painting, especially if I'm doing a bigger one. If it's smaller, it's whatever. But anyway, I'm ranting about that. I'm ranting about that. I think it's important to make sure you can rest your hand somewhere and that's why I go from the top of my painting and paint down so by the time I go back to the top, everything's dry for my next layer. You can see here, I'm basically doing the same thing that I did above in this highlighted area. There's also a couple spots that have some of those dark wiggly shapes that are reflections, just like a mirror. And so I'm taking one of my round brushes there, one of those Craftmo brushes. I really love them. They're really great. And I'm carefully drawing those out. The great thing about those round brushes is because they have that pointed tip, these tiny little details, the little tapering that I do with these shapes is really easy because all you have to do is lift your brush slightly and that point creates that tiny little line that you need and get those tapered looks, which is lovely. Lovely for round brushes. And I will say round brushes aren't always my favorite. I really sometimes never paint with a round brush at all. I really like the Craftmo ones as far as round brushes goes. Other people love round brushes. It's whatever. I prefer filberts and flat brushes. But for things like this, when you're needing tiny dots, tiny tapers and stuff like that, a round brush is lovely. You can see me going back up to the top here. I'm adding just a couple more dark spots, kind of defining out my reflections up there just a little bit more, maybe in areas where when I've been doing the highlights around those, I accidentally kind of painted over the sharpness of my highlights, not my highlights, my reflections, my shadows. Oh God, my brain's starting to turn to mush as I'm getting way deep into my recording session here. But like I did up above in that same highlighted area, moving down to that next section, I'm doing that same thing where I'm taking that light blue. That's pretty light. Like you can see that it's significantly lighter than what my original highlight was. And when I look at my reference photo, it's also significantly lighter, which is why I chose to make it that bright. I want to make sure that I'm really paying attention to the brightness levels on my highlighted areas because that makes a huge difference for water. Like I said, it's those subtle lighting changes. A lot of things make water look like water. I wish I could say it was like, if you nailed down this one specific thing, all of your water paintings would look beautiful. If you just did this, if you just did that. Unfortunately, water is so complicated. It's so simple and so complicated. I just probably spent 15 minutes talking about how not complicated and how simple water is. And then I'm like, actually, it's really complicated. It's a mixture of both. It's got both of those in there. Even though some of this might come off as like a little bit rambly, usually my painting videos are a lot more condensed to make sure I'm getting as much information into a very digestible and watchable video as possible. And this one being a little bit longer and me kind of just being a little bit chatty and letting you see a lot more of my painting process. It's kind of nice and I can kind of justify myself ranting a little bit about some of the choices that I make when I'm painting, which is fun. I know some people might like this style of video more so than maybe a short 15 minute or 10 minute overview of how I created a painting. If you do, let me know. If you don't like this, let me know in the comments. I want to know what people want to see, how people learn best. I know it's going to be different for different people, but the more information I can glean about my audience and my quote unquote students, you're all my students, learning from me about how to paint from somebody who herself is an amateur painter. So we're just all learning from each other, right? Let me know. Let me know in the comments below what your thoughts and feelings are, how you learn what you like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Please tell me. I want to know. Because really, I'm making this content for you. I'm obviously making paintings and I'm sharing them because it's something that I love to do, but I'm sharing it because I want to share. I want to have other people be able to get things out of what I'm doing, like I've been able to do from other creators who've helped me out and helped me learn how to paint because some of you might not know, but I'm not a trained painter whatsoever. Everything I know is from me just kind of doing my thing and researching people online and learning from them, learning from other YouTube painters, learning from books and articles. Not really. Who reads a book? Oh my God, that was such a lie. I don't read a book. Oh my God. Anyway, my point is, let me know. I want to know anyway. OK, we're getting back to painting. OK, so now I'm going in with my brightest, brightest highlight. This is what I was talking about when I was talking about subtly changing that highlight color. Now we're going in with the most vibrant part. I might add a couple little bits that are like some bright white bits later, but as far as the streaks of our highlights goes, it's this is as bright as it's going to get. So I'm going in and kind of much more thinly than I was doing the highlights before, adding in the streaks of super bright blue. And honestly, it's not that bright when you look at it, say, mixed up on your palette, but comparatively to the rest of your painting, contrast wise, this is going to be the part that is super contrasty for all the lines of our water as opposed to the like darkest part of our shadows, if that makes any sense at all. And like what I was doing when I was adding the middle ground highlight detail for the painting, I'm taking my time. This is what people are going to see. This is the finishing, polishing parts of our painting. The very, very, honestly, the most, well, didn't I say the most important part was the foundation? It's all the most important part. I'm just talking out of my ass, but each element is very important. So you have to give each element the respect, I guess, that it deserves. It's easy to sometimes rush through things that you don't love to do. Say you want to be done with your painting. You're sick of it. You don't want to add these polishing highlights. You want this to be just done as is. And that's fine. If you want to do that, that's totally fine. But to step it up to that next level, to add that realism, this detailed polishing additional highlight layer is just as important as your foundational pieces. So give it the time it deserves. Give yourself the time you deserve to make your painting beautiful. It's easy to cop out once you've gotten to a certain level because you're tired of it. You're sick of it. You just want to be done. I get you. I've been there a million times over and I've definitely left paintings that are quote unquote finished that are actually unfinished because I did not push it to the next level. This is the area that you are really going to grow as an artist. You're going to see your growth as an artist in these polishing pieces. So let yourself do this, okay? Don't cop out. You're almost at the finish line. This is the fun part. Honestly, this is the fun part. Adding in these details because the complicated, making sure the ratios are correct and the background colors are set up, you know, the foundation, that's done. This is the fun part for me personally. I'm realizing now as I'm watching myself paint this that that's not my brightest highlight. Actually, I'm definitely going to be going in with an even brighter highlight and that's something that I always forget when I'm painting with acrylics is that once my paint is down and it dries, it is not nearly as bright as it was when it was wet because of that shine that the wet paint has to it. It gives it a lighter, brighter feel to it. So I do this all the time. I just told you right now, that's the brightest highlight we're going to have. No, it's not. Absolutely no, it's not because what happens is, and I probably thought that when I was painting too, once it dries, it darkens just a little bit. Enough for when you're working in super subtle colors like this for you to notice a big difference. And so something to keep in mind and something that it's totally okay to forget, like obviously I did here with this painting, your acrylics are going to get darker. So when you're working with your highlights, take note of that and maybe brighten it up just slightly more than you thought you needed to. Sometimes you got to get a feel for it. Don't just add a bunch of white, willy nilly not knowing what it's going to turn out like. You got to play with it and experiment with it. But then conversely, when you're working with your shadows, don't over darken it. So when it dries, it's too dark. Does that make sense? It's subtle. That's something that you just have to experience and work with in real life as opposed to watching somebody on a video do it to know the changes of paint color once it's dried and once it's wet. You got to mess around with that yourself. But I'm giving you a warning here because obviously I messed up there and I'm very sorry. I just told you that it was the brightest color and it wasn't. We're going in. We're going in with brighter. As I'm talking about my mistakes and my own misinterpretations of my paintings as I'm watching them back, know that even painters who are pretty experienced, I consider myself a fairly experienced painter. I love it. I do it a lot. It's my big time hobby. Know that even painters who do a lot of paintings who make things they really love and are proud of make lots of mistakes all the time. It's always a learning process. Just because somebody makes a painting that you perceive as so beautiful and perfect and flawless doesn't mean it was always that way and doesn't mean it's still that way to the artists themselves. There's a lot of perception that goes into painting and looking at other artists' painting and judging our own paintings. All in all, I say this literally all the time, but just be nice to yourself when painting. You're supposed to enjoy it. Enjoy the process, not just focus on the final product. The process is what the enjoyable part is. The final product is a great reward for it, but what's the point if you're miserable for the hours you're painting? Enjoy it. This has been Em's pep talk corner while we added in the brighter highlights that I had told you weren't going to exist and now exist. You know. So just like we added the detail to the highlighted part of our painting, I'm also adding those little tiny details into the shadow part of my painting. Like in the very bottom triangle of that painting, I know in my reference photo I've got these tiny little light green wiggly little light tendrils, light lines that are kind of showing through to honestly, I think that's the bottom of the sand below the water. It's light that's reflecting onto the sand below the water. That's only showing up in that closest part to us if you can't see the sand the further you get in the water because the angle of the neck is a complicated like light refraction in your view through water and I'm not getting into that today, but I saw that there were little green lines and I wanted to add those little green lines and same if there's lighter parts in my shadows that I wanted to just like ease up a little bit, make a little more blended. I'm going in with a little lighter color. Likewise, I'm adding slightly darker spots to areas that I think need just a little, little more contrast. This is all super, super tiny, super, super tiny and honestly, a lot of you might look at this painting and be like, well, it looks done. Like why is she even adding more? It's all up to your eye. Really, like the more you look, you can honestly never be done with a painting if you looked close enough, you could always be adding and adding and adding and adding. Look, I'm even going back in with more highlights. I'm just adding and adding and adding. There's a part where you have to tell yourself to stop, but there's also a point where you have to push yourself further to make it as beautiful and vibrant as you want it to be. So now we're getting to like the best, favoritest, my funnest part of the whole painting. Wasn't in the reference photo, but I'm adding it anyway because God knows I love sparkles. I want sparkles, super mega highlights that just make this painting magical. What I'm doing first is I'm adding really transparent yellowish color in dots that you can probably barely see. I'm making them so subtle and then I'm shifting a little bit of that wave to be a little bit brighter green and then I don't like it and then I shift it a little bit more, blah, blah, blah. Ignore that. That was a mistake. See, artists make mistakes. Ignore that. So now I have to cover it up. Ignore that. We're going back to the sparkles. So I'm adding in these transparent yellow spots. They're kind of like a dark yellow so that I can then take a brighter yellow and dab them on top to start that kind of sparkly effect. The reason I do that darker yellow base is to give the sparkle kind of an aura, a little yellow aura about it so it looks like it's shining because you can just put a little dot of white and that can be considered a sparkle, but to give it that really shiny effect, I like to have that quote-unquote aura around it. I'm not even sure if it comes off that well in the video for you to be able to see what that looks like, but in real life, it makes a huge difference. Also to convey the kind of sparkle, I add kind of like a diamond shape, like a little bit of a cross, not to everything, just some of the bigger sparkles. I add that little cross. You can also see that because these sparkles were in the reference photo, I have to choose where they go and the choices I'm making are explicitly on the highlighted part of our water, excluding a couple tiny little variations. I've got a couple sparkles, like maybe literally three that are in the shadow part. The vast majority of them sit on our highlights and that's because that's where the light is going to be hitting the water. I want these sparkles to only show up where the light is because it gives you a realistic idea of where these sparkles actually would go, even when they're not in reality on a reference photo. And then honestly, I don't know what else I'm doing because that painting looks done to me. That is a totally beautiful finished painting of water that we made with acrylics. Pretty advanced, pretty advanced. If you made it all the way through, good God, I'm so proud of you because that is not an easy painting and you made it, dude. You made it. If you have any requests for more paintings you'd like to see, let me know in the comments below. Let me know how you like to learn from these videos and I'll see you in the next video.