Chris Howard's Writing & Art: Coloring water --notes on drawing and painting water in motion

29 March 2008

Coloring water --notes on drawing and painting water in motion

A quick post with images and notes on how the surface of water picks up light and plays with it.

I'm interested in drawing and painting water--yeah, I know, big surprise. The surface of water is difficult to paint--for me anyway. It's dynamic, a fluid mirror with shifting light and changing colors, transparent enough to let sunlight through. It comes in endless--for lack of a better word--formats, curling like a breaking wave, rolling with a gentle tidal surge, flat and smooth as glass, pouring, filling, bubbling, spraying.

I've been using pics of water I've taken to help me understand how to draw water better, and posting them here to see if they may help others. Click on any of the pics to see them larger.

In my last painting--Kassandra stretching on the beach, I spent some time looking at how light reflects across that hard compact sand at the wet edge of the tideline. It's almost like watching someone walk across a mirror, walking feet that smear into the sand, nothing but the color of the sand reflecting smooth sky and then bold watercolor-like strokes sprouting from the subject's feet toward you.

Here's a shot looking down on Puget Sound. I love the way the reflected color plays across the water's surface with this container ship, the way the letters in HANJIN stretch through the dark reflection of the hull--and all the way to the bottom of the image. (I haven't touched up any of these images, except for the one I filtered to bring out the reflections in the rippling surface--see below).

Water gone wild.

Here's another interesting shot of a sailboat berthed, late in the afternoon with the water undulating and reflecting the world in thousands of distorted rings.