#floridabottlenose

[namu-the-orca]

Tips for painting underwater scenes & dolphins

@floridabottlenose asked:

Hi! My name is Jaynee, and I also enjoy creating digital paintings of cetaceans. I've seen some of your recent digital paintings of cetaceans, and they were absolutely beautiful, and very realistic. Unfortunately, I can never get my digital paintings to look so stunning - do you think you could give me some tips on how to improve my cetacean art? Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks!

I guess some of my biggest issues are with the shading/highlighting and colors. For one thing, I have trouble getting the shading/highlights positioned right, and I see in some of your art, the cetaceans may have several shades of blue (similar to the colors of the water) in the shading, but I can't find out how to properly mix those extra colors in. I currently will paint a solid color, then paint some lighter shades for highlights and darker shades for shadows, and finally use a "blend" tool to smudge them - does this sound right, or do you have a suggestion on a better way to do shadows/highlights?

[link to art examples]

First off, thank you so much ;w; And I’m more than happy to help! Over the years I’ve found some ‘rules’ to painting underwater (it’s probably called physics) and personally they’ve helped me a lot in rationalising my underwater art, and make it more realistic. I hope these assorted ramblings and tips make sense and can be useful!

ABOUT UNDERWATER COLOURS

I think use of colours is your main point of improvement. I’ve noticed that in your paintings you make your dolphins grey (the totally desaturated kind), like one might see in a scientific illustration. However, the way a dolphin is depicted in such an illustration is as if they were suspended in a more-or-less evenly white lit room. Needless to say, this does not happen often in real life. Which is exactly why adding this third minke (illustration) looks so weird:

Especially since dolphins are more or less grey in colour, they almost never actually appear grey in real life. Shine some orange sunset-sunshine on them and they look orange brown. Put them underwater and I can assure you they are completely in shades of blue. This largely has to do with three important ‘rules’ that apply when painting dolphins (or really anything) underwater. (Note: for simplicity’s sake I just assume the water is blue, but the same applies for waters of a different colour.) 

1. The further away from the viewer = the more blue

You may recognise this phenomenon from landscapes. Looking out my window, the nearby trees are colourful with high contrast, while the ones near the horizon are a low-contrast, washed out, whitish. Surprise surprise, today the sky is greyish white. You’ll also see this with faraway mountains looking blueish when the sky is blue. The hazier the air, like when it’s misty, the greater the effect. On clear days, even objects a considerable distance away may still have most of their colours. Have some scarily textbook examples I took on holiday:

The same goes underwater. The further away an object is, the more it takes on the colour of the surroundings, and (as a result) the more contrast it looses. The murkier the water, the greater the effect. The closer an object is, the more it retains its own colours, and the stronger its contrast. Knowing this, it is important to think about where the viewer is located in your painting. Let’s think of it as someone being in the water with a camera, taking a photo of a dolphin (which is your painting). Is the photographer right there in front of the action? Or are they far away, zooming in? In the first case, the dolphin should be crisp and colourful, in the second case they should be washed-out blue.

Now, in no case are anyone’s eyes every glued to a dolphin’s skin, so you’ll always have at least some loss of contrast and colour underwater. Just, the more you add, the further away the dolphin seems. It’s mostly a case of picking the right colours from the start. I always pick my background colour first, and then based on that & their position choose colours for the animals. You can still make small adjustments by lowering the dolphin’s opacity, or adding a low-opacity layer of background colour on top, to make them seem further away.

Let’s go through this example, from right to left. In sunlight, killer whales are kind of brownish, not pure black. So the closest part of the whale is a very low saturation red. Now the next colour swab is weirdly green. Very low saturation again, but still, green. This is because, as we move along the whale’s body, the colours shift from sunlight’s red to the background’s blue hue. To go from red to blue, one passes through green (and then that cyan-ish colour that’s next). The colours are still pretty desaturated, even the furthest part of the whale is mid-saturation. But! By now it’s nearly the same hue as the background, just a tinge more towards cyan. Now we move on to the background killers, and you can see that both have the same hue as the background. The little whale is only darker in colour, because she’s closer than the big bull in the background, who’s further away and thus has less contrast (i.e. lighter shadows).

2. The deeper (further away from the surface) = the more blue

A dolphin might be two inches from your face, but if you both are 100 feet down you bet your ass they’re gonna be blue either way. Water has this wonderful tendency to filter colours out with depth. It’s a pretty well known phenomenon: red is the first to go, blue the last. Seemingly colourful, bright red fish can appear a camouflaged greyish brown in their natural environment. Which is exactly why cameramen take along huge lights underwater: without them all the corals and pretty fish would just appear in shades of blue.

You can see this effect with a pod of dolphins at the surface. Close to the surface they appear grey, or even warm brown if the sun is shining well. Podmates swimming deeper are once again blue. The same effect is also used on the kelp pillars in my painting:

The kelp is in the distance, so it’s all more or less blue. But you can see that the deep (dark) part is a real blue hue, the same as the background, while the hue of the shallow (light) part has significantly shifted towards the kelp’s true colour, namely golden brown.

3. Shadows are blue

So let’s say you have a painting of a dolphin close to the viewer, at the surface - there’s still going to be blues in there. Shadows fall where the primary light, usually the sun, does not reach. Yet shadows are not pitch-black holes of total darkness. ‘Secondary lighting’ gives light and colour to shadows. Since the surroundings are all blue, all secondary, reflected light that falls on the shadows is also blue. As such, the darker the shadow the more saturated blue it is.

A funny exception happens when there are multiple dolphins swimming side-by-side, with the light coming in at an angle. The shadowed side of dolphin 1 would be facing the brightly lit side of dolphin 2. This light would be reflected back onto the (supposedly) shadowed side of dolphin 1. You can see it beautifully on these spinner dolphins.

ABOUT PAINTING DOLPHINS

So, this is quite a bit shorter and less structured than the above part. Mostly because my advice is really very boring when it comes to understanding where light and shadows fall on dolphins: draw dolphins. Lots and lots. More specifically, draw by studying photos, preferably photos taken at odd angles or with strong lighting. These things reveal a lot about the 3D shape of a dolphin. With practice (and good references!) you’ll start to build up a mental map of where the bumps and dips are, how the cheeks curve, the eyes bulge, the chin bends. Once you understand their shape, you are free to shade them according to your chosen light source. One day I want to make a tutorial on this exact topic, but for now I’m afraid this will have to suffice!

Regarding actual painting techniques, I would discourage you from using a blend tool to blend colours together. I used to do the same thing for a good while, but I must say I vastly prefer the result I get from actually painting the transitions. Lots of strokes, low opacity - at some point it starts blending nicely. Also, be careful what colours you pick for your shadows and highlights. As all the colour stuff above has hopefully shown, hues shift across the animal. Highlights, midtones and shadows all have different hues. In the case of my kelp killer whale, the highlights are reddish brown and the shadows blue. Picking shadows and highlights in the same hue as your base colour makes a painting feel flat.

Okay, I think that’s all for now?? If I’ve forgotten anything I’ll try to add it. I hope this helps! And feel free to ask if anything is not clear.

[flukesandflorida]

Previously “floridabottlenose”