#wet effect

As always, start with a sketch!

This tutorial is mostly about the colouring, so I’m going to skip through the early stages real quick. Get the major body shapes down first, then do the clothes afterwards. Wet clothes have more wrinkles as you can see in the next image.

Now the inking stage. The water will make hair and fabric heavy and sticky. Hair clumps together at the ends instead of sitting its usual fluffy way, and sticks to the forehead. Fabric will stick to the body and have tighter, thinner wrinkles. For more on wrinkles, visit my wrinkle tutorial. You’ll notice that the wrinkles on wet fabric are longer and more form-fitting than dry fabric. I branch them out in sort of ‘U’ or ‘Y’ shapes.

For skin tones, I use ivory for the base layer, followed by satin for midtones, then putty for core shadows. Before you start, make sure you know where you want your light source to be. For this image, it’s behind him to the right, so the shadows will be on the left.

Midtones can reach to the left edge, but don’t let the core shadows reach the edge. The lighter space between the core shadow and the edge is the reflected light, and it’s important for making shapes look 3D.

Next is hair (head, eyebrows, stubble). From lightest to darkest, I used oatmeal, sandstone, bronze. I think I went a little too dark for Seb, but oh well. The point is, work light to dark, leaving a lighter space for the shine in a halo-like shape around the head towards the light source. Make strokes in the direction of hair flow, from the top down to the forehead.

For the shirt I used pastel blue. It shows up very differently on paper than the scanner; much darker and less green on paper. To get the watery effect, use the long edge of a chisel tip and make thick strokes outward from the corners of the wrinkles. Leave the thin, branchlike parts of the wrinkles white. We’ll come back to the shirt again later.

Next are the trousers. First layer is the base, just enough to fill in the whole space. Then the second layer is made with the same colour, using the same technique as the shirt. It should go without saying, but press harder where it should be darker (i.e. the corner of a wrinkle, the crotch area…), and stroke outward from there.

The purpose of this layer is really to bring out the wrinkles. A warning for this one: it’s a lot more visible when a dark colour bleeds outside the lines than the lighter markers above.

Next is just to colour in the belt and watch, they’re so small I usually don’t even bother shading them.

Next I go over all the shadowed parts of the shirt, undershirt, and skin with pale jade. It’s a very pale colour, so several layers may be necessary to make it visible. You might even skip this step if you want.

Then go over the arms and shoulders with ivory to make it look like you can see skin through the shirt. If you aren’t drawing a shirt underneath too, you would put ivory where the shirt sticks to his chest as well.

Don’t colour in the white wrinkles (indicated by red); those are lifted off the body. Colour in the spaces beside the wrinkles darkest (green) that stick to the skin.

Then another layer of pastel blue following the same rules as before, just to darken the shirt a bit more.

The background was a layer of pastel blue followed by a warm grey just to darken it.

I used the same grey to add some more shadows on the shirt because it looked a little pale. Then rain streaks were done using cool aqua. Draw the raindrops from bottom to top in quick strokes. That way, the ink gathers at the bottom of the drop and tapers towards the top as if it were in motion.

Last is the white! You can use white ink or paint, whatever works. Like the blue, draw upward in quick strokes so that the bulk of the ink is contained at the bottom of the drop. Leave watermarks in the hair, and lastly the shines on the eyes. If there is enough rain, you could draw steams of water running down his face too. The water would collect at the ends of his hair and drip down his chin as well.

For more water streaks, you can take a look at this drawing (nsfw-ish) from last week.