Water might seem hard to draw sometimes, but when you understand some simple rules, it can really help you express movement and emotion in your drawing.

In this tutorial I’m going to give some tips on drawing water in motion.

Let’s get started with splashes!

Splashes

At first let’s look at the still water, it’s basically made out of horizontal stripes and it’s pretty easy to draw…

At the very beginning when an object hits the water, it splashes in various directions in straight lines. Just like this:

The moment after that, splashes create arcs instead of straight lines and start reaching for the water surface. Like this:

After all this, splash creates some ripples and bubbles around:

After some time water surface becomes still again…

Pouring Water

There we have a simple sketch of a glass…

Now I’ll show how to draw pouring water.

At first water starts falling down, but it hasn’t reached the bottom of the glass yet.

The stream has two sides as we look into it in profile, the round and wavy side.

When the water hits the glass, it splashes in various directions, just like we saw in Splashes section. Like this:

But because of the angle, water creates a wave…

Wave breaks and starts rolling to the other side…

After it breaks, water starts flowing in a formed loop, just like on a rollercoaster…

And when the stream of water stops, water stops spinning as well.

I really hope this tutorial was helpful. Your opinion would be great, because I’m thinking of making more tutorials about drawing more types of water and other stuff ;)