Illustrating the ocean is difficult, this is because it never sits still long enough for you actually draw or paint, it is always in motion, and ever changing. This 
tutorial deals with just one aspect of the sea, and that is when you are standing 
on the shore with the sun on or near the horizon and the waves are breaking. 

Often, you will almost seem to see through the waves, they are not quite transparent, and the  effect of the sun lightens areas of the wave making them beautiful to watch. Today, I'm going to show how to duplicate that effect when you create your own illustrations of the sea. PSP has a few nifty tools that 
speed up this process considerably.

     First start off by opening a new file, make it twice as wide as it is long to give 
your final picture a "Snapshot" look. In this case, The new file was created at 1200 pixels wide by 600 pixels high with a 72 PPI resolution, and a white background as I wanted to use the image online only.

  Choose your Line drawing tool and in the tool options section, choose Bezier 
Curved, and Stroked lines, give it a width of four pixels, and check the "Anti-alias" 
box. The first lines we are going to draw are the rough shapes of the waves, I set 
the foreground color to grey so the lines would be grey. Overlap the bezier lines 
like this:

 Next you are going to fill in the main ocean colors... You can start by choosing a 
medium or dark green... select the areas you want to fill with the magic wand, 
holding down the shift key to select multiple areas. Next select your fill tool, another words the paint bucket on the left side menu... right click for the tools  option menu. On the tool options menu for your fill tool, choose Solid color, and Darken, from the drop down menus and set your Opacity to 100%. Click anywhere in the selected area to fill... your pic should look like this now:

   Next your are going to put in the the deep water, and the areas where the water 
sections are dense... Choose Layer: New Raster Layer to create another working 
layer so you don't mess up the seagreen layer. By creating another area to work 
on in the illustration you can mess up and you won't lose all your work. On the 
new layer, choose the airbrush tool, (The Spray Paint can on the left side menu) 
set your foreground color to black, deep navy blue, or a dark purple. In the 
tool:option menu set the Opacity, and Step of the airbrush to 25% each (25). 
Then paint in the deepwater areas by repeatedly airbrushing segments of canvas 
where the deep waters will be.... You can experiment around a bit, and try 
different colors out, to see how the image will turn out different...

 When you are done merge the layers together using Layer:Merge, and choose the 
merge visible option... Now are you ready to put in highlights? Good! Create a 
new raster layer. Choose the lasso off your menu and lasso areas of your picture where the sun will shine through, or where the water will be shallow and more translucent...  Pick a light lemon yellow foreground color and then choose your airbrush tool. Keeping the Opacity and Step size the same, reduce the size of 
the brush and paint in the brighter areas. When you are satisfied, merge 
your layers together and your illustration should look now look like this

                        Now it's time to add the foam and whitecaps... ready?
  Choose a very light blue or grey foreground color. Keeping your airbrush tool on 
a tight leash, with a small brush diameter. In the airbrush tool:option menu you can increase the Opacity and Step to 50 % or even more for the first few strokes... All 
you want to do is airbrush in the lines you drew first resembling the shapes of the 
waves, then increase the diameter of the brush, and decrease the Step and Opacity 
to less than 20%, go over the lines you just drew again, and further wherever you 
want to put spray or your wave crest, run the airbrush over these areas. When you are done, you'll be doing real good if your illustration looks like this:

  Ok... Now for just a couple more steps and you will be all set. You want to blur 
the image to blend the pixels together some. Choose Image:Blur from the menu.... 
Maybe once more just to get the picture good and blurry... Then you are going to 
take one more major step, after that it's all touch up. You are going to apply a 
hot wax coat to your illustration. Here's how. On the top file menu, choose 
Image:Filter Browser and choose Hot Wax Coating. Wow! Now we are getting 
close... Go ahead, experiment with all the filters to see what they can do for you... 
This is starting to look like a real ocean... From here, we go to final touchups...

 Choose Image:Blur once or twice more to get rid of the grainy effect of the hot wax coating and choose your Airbrush to finish the job. You want to pick a bright off-white color as you are going to now add in the wave crest and selected areas will have sea spray as well. With your air brush diameter small, and your airbrush Opacity set to 50 or 75 % and your airbrush Density set to 75% paint the white foam crest of the wave right underneath the sea horizon line, paint in any other areas where the foam is so thick as to obscure the ocean at this time as well. Now set the Airbrush Opacity and Density to 25 % keeping the brush small add sea spray in selected areas around the foam and crest where the sea is especially violent. If anything looks odd in the illustration use the Touchup tool on the left side of your menu (The little hand symbol...) The touchup tool allows you quite a variety of blending options to experiment with,  and with your eyes, you can any fix any obvious inconsistencies in the illustration. Play around, experiment a bit. With just a bit of practice you too, can be creating realistic seascapes in ten minutes or less... Here is what the final illustration looked like after adding the wave crests, touching up the sea spray, and blurring the image one last time. 

Here is another one I like a bit better... From the same base illustration. It may take a bit of practice to get the effect you want.

 Thanks for your time today. You can look forward to seeing other tutorials on 
oceans painting before too long featuring the varied effects of ocean temperature, 
sunlight, glow and reflections, along with another tutorial on how to paint nearly 
transparent water flowing over rocks... Great for rocky seashores and high mountain streams...

Bibliography:
Robinson, E. John. The Seascape Painters Problem Book
New YorkWatson Guptil Publications, 1976.
Jasc Software. Jasc Paint Shop Pro Version 6.0 User's Guide
Jasc Software, Inc. 1999.

Copyright 2001, All rights reserved. Dirk T. Collins res04tzu@gte.net