so you got your four colors you've got phthalo blue french ultramarine blue cadmium yellow light and white and you need a few brushes you need something big for pushing a lot of paint around something in the middle a couple of small ones for doing all the fine detail and you're gonna have a nice big pallet here something you can spread lots of paint around on and a great big water pot so I've mixed my phthalo blue here a little bit of this cadmium yellow light and some white tint seus bits of wok bit of water to make it spread and I got that lovely beautiful tropical color now we're gonna spread that paint all over here canvas we want plan to your paint don't be afraid to dip the brush in the water a little bit not too much and by shallow of water we need to have a little bit more sand in there it's a little bit more yellow and little bit more white to make a little bit lighter like that and we mix the two colors up on the palette right next to that one so we make sure that we're making any mistakes here and not on our painting now I throw that shallower water color on the canvas beneath the other one and you can see I'm sort of really pushing it into the canvas and I'm not worried too much about being a little bit uneven so now I'm just going to repeat this process all the way down the canvas using more yellow and more white as I go so we've got that lovely transition here we're starting up in the deeper water a little bit more phthalo blue and as we come down we add cadmium yellow light and white gradually creating the illusion of deeper water coming into shallow and if you look at the palette got the same thing happening here on our palette that's where all the working out happens so here's where we get to have some fun if you ever have a look at the water in in some of the light filters through and creates a beautiful pattern on the bottom we're going to do that and we're gonna use the same mix of colors that we have here on our palette and we're gonna use them in a way that creates that fantastic pattern this is one of the advantages of leaving all of those colors on that palette having them spread out you can come back to them later on a little tip I'm using this color here and you'll notice that it's lighter than the deeper water color so I'm going to use this color I'm gonna roll my brush yeah this is not as easy as it looks so practice so now I'm coming down into that lighter color here and I'm gonna put my brush down here where it doesn't matter so much and gradually come up higher now I'm creating the illusion of a series of very loose kind of diamond shapes and we repeat this process gradually adding again more cadmium yellow light and more white as we come down into shallower water so once you've got a rough idea don't be afraid to kind of go back up with that paler color up here into the deeper water those little extra little sparkles here and there that'll make it zine finally add a lot more white and just bump it up here and there create a really nice intense light so for the final piece of this we're going to represent the sky on the surface of the water and in fact putting the sky on it will actually create the surface of the water and we've used lovely cool colors so now we're going to we want it to be a warm summer's day so we reflect a warm summer sky color so for this exercise we're just going to use French ultramarine blue and white to create the illusion of the light reflecting on the back of the waves our nice pale blue a color little bit of water in there so it moves and you'll notice I'm working my brush on the surface here or on the palate here because I want to make my mistakes there I want to know my brush is gonna do here before I put it here I'm just going to very roughly put in a few highlights here and there just to start the process and these are the best way to describe them would be very flat shallow use you can think of it like a series of very long double use but stay away from pantomime waves okay so now I'm just putting in a few random ones here and there and if you look closely you can sort of see maybe there's three sets of waves here so I'm just now gonna fill those gaps and continue with that illusion now a little tip if you want to flatten the water especially in these circumstances or create flat spots between the wave reflect the sky I'm making it brush very dry because we only want to put tiny little bits of paint on it's not a bad idea just to put a little bit of paints on first because it makes the process much less scary it's very non-committal now to sort of create that curved effect I'm going to put some highlights on the front of the waves so I'm gonna use a little bit more white and that'll suggest reflecting a lower part of the sky and create that lovely scalloped sort of shape and it'll make the white stand out more down here or the sky anyway I should say so just adding white to that and you'll see I've mixed it up and thanks to that color so that I can see how strong I need to make it and now I'm taking a lot of the paint off on my pallet and not on my painting and on the front edge of each of these waves so what we've done now is we've created the illusion of the light hitting the surface of the water and all those little waves associated with it but fundamentally what a wave is is a lump of water so what I want to do in order to make it more of a lump is to add more water color to it so I'm going to do another little trick now and I'm gonna get a little bit of phthalo blue like that just mix it up there on my palette just add the tiniest bit of water to it get yourself a singlet you can wipe your paint on and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get that blue I'm just gonna brush it here very very gently I don't know if you can see that it's just in the face of the wave at the top very very thin paint what that will do is make the face of the wave looking a little steeper and make the water look a little deeper just make sure you did the very dry brush very non-committal that's a lovely little exercise to create the illusion of tropical water but we all know that water doesn't always look exactly like that so what I've done is I've broken down the appearance of water into four elements all of which will relate to one another in different ways and you can get that on my DVD water fundamentals you should be able to click somewhere there for more information on that or there's a whole pile of free stuff on our website explore acrylic painting calm