Now I’m going to paint, a calm sea. This is going to be a bit more involved than the clouds were.

I already laid down a gradient as a base color.

This is going to be a calm sea. And calm water can be pretty reflective. So the next thing I’m going to do is copy>paste the sky onto the water, Flip it upside down, and lower the layer’s opacity so the gradient can show through.

Isn’t that cool? It’s already looking kind of like water.

It’s a bit too reflective, though. Calm seas aren’t still enough to be that reflective. So I’m going blur the reflection a bit. I want the skies color to be represented in the water, but I don’t want the detail.

Here’s where things become involved. It’s time to work on the waves.

Think of waves as crisscrossing speed bumps. I’m going to paint the contours of waves like I’d paint bumps. I’ll begin with the dark sides, and work my way towards the light sides.

I’m going to do this part in grayscale to make it easier for you to see what I’m doing.

First I’ll paint in the dark sides of the speed bumps.

Working dark to light I carefully follow the contours of the speed bumps. This takes time and patience but the result is worth it.

I keep adding layers with lighter grays continuing to define the contours. I’m not going to go all the way to white. I’ll stop when my lightest gray is blending with the blue.

Look at that, I have waves. But they don’t look right, they’re the wrong color.

Now a Photoshop trick - I’ll set the the Photoshop layers that I painted the gray waves in to ’soft light’.

There you go, I have waves. And they’re the right color.

The waves are looking pretty good but they could use some detail work. And maybe some contrast.

I’ll begin by scribbling some darker areas on a few of the waves. And a whitish hilite along the tops of some of them.

The white at the tops of the waves is going to be the brightest. As I move away from the tops the lighter colors will work their way towards the blue.

I’ve added a few swirls of surface foam near the bottom.

I’ll stop here. I think it’s time to work on the foreground. In this case the foreground will be the deck of a pirate ship.

Did you find this tutorial helpful? Comments, questions, and suggestions are appreciated.