How To Paint Sun Reflection On Waves

Hey there everybody, Joe here. I've got my color app open and that is at colorapp.org if you want to go to it and test it yourself. Joe, as in Joanne, not as in myself, has sent in this picture and asked the question, "How can I reflect sunlight directly off of the waves?" So, we're not making the reflection of sky or clouds, but reflecting the sun itself. So, when water is real sparkly from that bright reflection. How do we do that? All right, here's a good way to do it. We need high contrast. And so, I'm going to add a layer. I'll just click that button. It's a clunky app. If you use it, it's likely to have some errors or crash. It's still under construction, but it's enough for me to do a demo here. So, I'm gonna zoom in and I'm gonna put white, but I won't put a white that's brighter than what I think this photo shows. I don't want to cheat with digital colors. So, let's take a color that is, you know, like the pure white that the picture already has just so that we're representing this this amount of exposure. Let me try to get the brightest one that I've got there. Oh, we missed that one here. Let's let's go right here. How about that one? And so then I'm going to put dots on what I judge to be the same place on every wave. So let's really zoom in here. I'm going to take my line size down. Now, here's how reflection happens. It's at the same angle on every wave. So it's entirely anglebased. Let's do a little bit bigger line here. Okay. I'm going to put one here. Now, I chose the dark color between the reflections. So, I'm just going to choose that on every spot. Same place on every wave. Let's undo that one. It came out kind of crooked. Put it here. Put it here. Now, since it's anglebased, we're going to see one area on the water that has more of that specific angle that reflects the mirror image of the sun. The sun may be in a much darker part of the sky than the clouds or other reflections. You know, the sun is quite a bit brighter than the sky itself. So, there's there's not a rule about where to put it. I don't have to put the bright spot like on a spot like that where there's already light reflection or here there's already reflection. There's no rule that I have to put the sun in the lighter reflection. It can be anywhere. So, I'm putting it here because the contrast will really stand out. It's strategic. Putting it on the darker part of the wave is not something that has to happen. It's just something I can do to get higher contrast. And we want contrast because we don't have the kind of contrast that our eyes have looking at the real thing. We've got just shades of paint in dim lighting compared to the outdoors. So, I'm just making dots on relatively the same place on each wave. And something important is that I'm not making strange shapes. So, with a paintbrush, you might dab around thinking that the shapes can kind of be scrambled all over. Well, that can resemble a lot of things other than reflection. Since we recognize water really strongly by pattern association, the the pattern of shapes, I want to make shapes that are similar to the sun itself because that's what it is. It's a mirror reflection of the sun. So, I'm going to try to stick with round twinkles. So, if we zoom out now, I've got those dots on a similar color uh portion of each ripple, each wave. In this picture, the ripples are not distinctly defined, but that's okay. They don't have to be. If they are, I'll probably try to choose a similar part on each wave rather than putting it on the light part of one wave, the dark part of another wave, so that it looks like that repeating pattern of reflection. Now, notice I've got a whole bunch of it over here where the water was already light. All of this water can have angles that will show me that mirror image of the sun. It's not restricted to one spot. However, if the sun is, for example, behind my left shoulder, then it's likely to reflect more over here because this part of the water with waves that are facing me have more angles, just a greater number of surface at the angle that will show me that sun than what I might see over here. So, it'll be everywhere, but think of a gradient where there's more of it in the spots that's uh in in one spot. You know, you pick a spot and there's more of it in that area and then less as you go out to other areas. I'm going to undo whenever I do a small uh whenever I do like a crooked shape. Now, I'm going to try to move a little bit quicker. Do some just let my finger skip across like this. This is a touch screen and I'm just doing little dots. Trying not to get trying not to get dotted lines, but when I'm working faster, it'll be harder. Okay. So, there's more of it here. Oh, that's a big spot that came out over there on the left. Okay. It it kind of dissipates here. It's just in uh you know, just just not as frequent. We're getting less and less fewer and fewer maybe is a better description. fewer and fewer angles that are showing me that mirror image of the sun. And this is very impressionistic. Like you see, I'm just just tapering it out. Now, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get my smear tool. And this could be done with a brush. It's there's there's a bunch of ways to accomplish this. But what I want to do is I'm going to take the amount of this down right here so that it doesn't smear it real aggressively. And then I'll put the size way up. And hopefully this is going to work. I'm gonna zoom in and just smear across. No, let's not do that. Let's take the amount down some more. Hang on. I want to just barely smear it because this is a real nice effect to get the look of like a a lens flare or a glow. Let's see if this works works better now. Okay. Still a little bit aggressive. Let's take the amount down. Let's do this. Let's see if this works. Ah, that's better. Okay, so now we've got some blurry spots and they're even kind of stretched out like the shape of a ripple because it's just a real big swipe with my blur tool. And now everywhere I see that blurred uh everywhere I see that blurred stroke, that's where I'm going to put my white dots now. So, let's put some right where I already have them, like this. put some in here. And so this is easy to accomplish with the paintbrush. You you just do a blurry spot first, then put a white dot over it. If you want to do a little twinkle, you could do that, too. You know, we could take the uh we could take the size down on the blurring tool. And whoa, that's that needs to be way here. I took the size down on the draw tool, but not the blur tool. Undo. Okay, let's see if this works. And then let's put the uh amount back up. And we go down. And then we could do a, you know, do like a X like that. Let's blend it out this way. Blend it out this way. You know, you can you can do this with the brush just as well. I I've done it a million times when I'm doing little twinkly stars. So, you know, if this suits your fancy and you want the twinkle look, that's possible, too. But it's not necessary. It's not necessary for for that effect. Okay. Now, let's go back. Let's get some white dots put on here. Let me make sure I've got the right line size. There we go. Put some in there. The little white dot in the middle of the twinkle. It's kind of a messy twinkle, but you get the point. Wonder what would happen if I kind of put this down. And you know, you want when you do twinkles, you want consistency of angles. You don't want to do like a different different angles on those. You want them all to have a similar angle. Sorry, I got kind of obsessed with the twinkles, didn't I? It was it was a fun idea and I started running with it. Let's put that in like this. It's fun drawing on other people's work, too. I got to tell you. Okay. These are caused by the shape of the lens. That's what the twinkles are caused by if you ever if you ever wondered. So, they can be different depending on what camera takes the photo. Okay. Now, let's put our little dots in place. We got twinkles here, twinkles here, twinkles here. Little bigger stroke will help me get it done faster. Okay, that's my twinkly area. Let's get back to what I was doing. I'm putting them in the middle of gradients. I can put more than one in a in a little spot. And it doesn't matter if every single dot has that gradient uh that blurry glow around it. It's just a a cool effect to have in there. Just something you can do. So, I'm looking for any little any little spot that has that um blurry blurry glow effect that I put in there. Just any of those. Putting dots in there. Let's Whoops. I didn't mean to put it on the top of that wave. Put it here. I see light spots in here. I'm just touching all my light spots just a touch. There we go. There's the effect we're looking for. Okay, that's it. I'll stop there. You can see the effect if you really uh take your time and and uh fill this out with that pattern. Then yours will look even better than mine. But this is the pattern that you can use to achieve that. So, in the end, the summary is we want high contrast. So, putting it on a darker part of the wave may be a good move. We want non-random shapes, pretty round, because it's the reflection of the sun. And we want it on the same part of each wave that is visible in your picture. Don't put them on random parts of the wave throughout. We want it on a gradient that is more concentrated in some part of the picture. Doesn't matter which part you choose, but it's the part that has the most angles that reflect it. And then the glow helps. It's a fun effect to put in there if you want to put that blurry glow. All right, I hope that's helpful to you. We'll see you on the next short video.