How to Paint the Water Drops

I would like to offer you a short but very useful and interesting art lesson. Today we will learn to understand how to paint the drops of water, dew, and rain in any art painting techniques. Thus you will be able to decorate and refresh your works with drops of water very quickly and easily. The main thing is to know and understand several simple rules which we are going to discuss right now…

Before starting to paint any more or less realistic picture (landscape, still life, portrait…), we consider and analyze the following things:

• Where does the light fall from? Where is the source of light? Where will the specks appear?
• Where does the shadow fall?
• Where and what overtones of the environment can appear on the surfaces and materials in this case?

The Water Drops Color

When painting the drops of water, everything is simple enough. The water is transparent and this means that it assumes the color of the external environment.

In our case when we learn to paint the water drops on the leaves, the drops will be slightly darker than the leaf itself. This depends on the environment where the flower is. If there is a dark environment, we should paint the darker base for our future droplet. And if there is a lighter environment, we will make this base light.
Under such conditions, you will not need any additional paints for drawing the droplets. In fact, the color of droplets is the color of leaves. As, for example, you can see in the following photo:

A Speck on the Water Drop

There is at least one source of light in any environment. When we know where the light comes from, we can paint the beams falling on our droplets. A bright speck will appear in the place where the beam is falling on the drop. The speck should be small but very bright and clear; most often it is the white dot on the surface of the droplet.

The Glare on the Drop

So, the beam falls on the drop, strikes through it, and diffuses. Thus, an overtone appears opposite the speck. This is not a bright and clear light spot.

The yellow shows how the beam falls leaves a speck, and how the light diffuses inside the droplet.
The blue shows the overtone, the reflection of a speck inside the drop.

The shadow Under the Water Drop

If there is a light, there should be a shadow. The shadow appears opposite the light source under the droplet – a small and darker arc under the droplet.

The green shows the shadow of a water drop on the leaf.

This is the simplest way and the simplest environment where the drops of water can be painted:

• one source of light,
• one shadow,
• one overtone,
• one color of leaves and no reflections.

If the water drops are in the multicolored environment, likely, they will also be multicolored.

Sometimes the drop can reflect the environment like a mirror. I doubt that you will have to draw such a picture because it requires a special idea and quite a high concentration of attention exactly on the drop in the composition.

Let`s watch a short painting lesson video to understand more clearly what I have already explained.

Free Painting Video – «How to Paint the Water Drops»

I hope these painting techniques will be useful for you.

That`s all!

Watch the outside world and admire the beautiful things!