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 800 pixels wide by 400 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 forgeound 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. Note: this is actually two 400x800 images placed end to end...

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