How do you draw things under water?

[RosesnWater]

So I’m working on a hand going under water and viewing it from above. And I hope fellow artists might be able to help or have suggestions. So how do you do objects under water?

[goatbat]

fortunately, there's a lot of good references for this! here and here are some good examples that might help you :] there are also cool videos where people put underwater cameras under waves and such that you can view if you'd like more references for how it looks when the 'viewer' is placed below the surface tension of the water, if that helps any.

i think a lot would depend on how the surface of the water is! water with more surface motion going in many different ways (like the ocean) is going to cast textured, weird highlights and shadows while something like a pool or a bath, the ripples are probably going to come from the intruding object (hand) or the ripples hitting the edge and coming back. (causing the highlights and shadows to be longer and more like stripes, less like dots.) so the light and shadows on your obejct would work differently based on those circumstances.

is there something specific you would like help with, like lighting, color, perspective, etc?

[RosesnWater]

Thank you for your reply! Yes it’s more calm water, it’s a human hand reaching into a clear pool of water to pick a clay figure out from the bottom ^^

This is a bit rough but I hope it’s understandable- right now I’m just playing with the concept of wiggly lines to show the water upsetting the image of the hand bellow

[RosesnWater]

And I’m only really in the sketch phase of the drawing process ^^

[MartaTod]

I think that if this is an important moment in your comic, and you wanted to achieve a bit of mystery with what the figure is, it works great with these ripples.

For me, it really depends on what mood I want to achieve and how much the underwater part is in focus. I think that in comics it's more important that the reader can clearly see what's represented, know how valuable it is to the story, and gets the right mood from it than that something looks 100% realistic. So I think about that when I draw some parts under water. In scenes that require something more simple, I just keep the objects undistorted or minimally distorted if it's clear calm water, and ink and color them to look more faint.

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

For something as complicated as a hand interacting with water, my first instinct is to see if I can find a photo of something close to what I'm looking for, and see what I can learn from that. I found a few stock photo images that are vaguely similar to your sketch. I especially like the reflective ripples on the last one.

[Lady_T_Musings]

If it's calm water then what you have sketched save instead of using tight zigzag motions, try a loose wave pattern on the part of the hand that's submerged. the zig-zag makes the water looks like it's rushing around or something is shaking the basin, but it defo looks like a hand under water

[system]

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