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How to Create Water Droplets

Objective:

The objective of this tutorial is to teach you how to achieve a fresh, water droplet effect for use in web or graphic design.

Difficulty:

Easy-Intermediate. Some basic Photoshop knowledge assumed.

Step 1:

Open up your graphic editor (I will perform this tutorial using Photoshop CS therefore if you use a different version or program you will simply have to translate as best as possible) and a new image. The image should be at least 300*300 pixels for this tutorial but this can be easily changed later. Fill the background layer with a colour of your choice (I will use #75B523 but it really doesn’t matter what colour you use in this exercise.)

Step 2:

Create a new layer above this and with the lasso tool, select several smooth shapes such as water would form on a flat surface. Don’t worry about jaggedness right now, just get the general shapes of the larger drops. Your image should now look like the one below.

Step 3:

Click the Select–Modify> Smooth option and set it to around 5 pixels (this will obviously need to be changed depending on the size of the document your working on as well as the jaggedness of your initial selections. Having done this, hold shift and use the ‘Elliptical Marquee Tool’ (accessed by clicking and holding the Rectangular Marquee button) to create smaller droplets of water around your main shapes. After you have done this, fill with a colour of choice (the colour doesn’t matter, you will only be using it for finding the selections of your shapes.) You should now have something similar to the image below.

Step 4:

Create another layer [drops back] and reselect the shapes by holding ctrl and clicking the ’shapes’ layer. Click Select–Modify>Expand and expand the selection by about 2 pixels (again this is relative to canvas size.) Fill this new selection with a colour slightly darker then the background colour and drag the new layer under the Shapes layer.

Step 5:

Use a Gaussian blur [Filter–Blur>Gaussian Blur] of about 2 pixels on the Drops Back layer so that the darker colour bleeds out onto the background a bit more without it having a sharp edge. Create another new layer [Drops Base] and fill the droplets areas (ctrl click the shapes layer again) with a colour darker then the background but lighter then the Drops Back colour. Click the eye icon on the Shapes layer to make it invisible.

Step 6:

Create another new layer [Highlight] and select the shapes again. Using the fill tool, fill all the shapes in pure white. Now go back and use the erase tool set in ‘brush’ mode with a soft brush of appropriate size and delete the highlight back until only the side closest to the light source is showing white. This may take a while to do and you may have to change brush sizes several times depending on the size of the water drop. Persevere until you achieve an effect similar to mine below.

Step 7:

Now we are seeing some of the magic happen! Create a new layer [Glow] under highlight and select the shapes again. This time use the airbrush tool set at about 30% transparency with a colour slightly lighter and move vibrant then the background colour to create a gentle glow on the opposite side to the light source. When you’ve done that, go back and use the erase tool similarly to how you did in step 6 to reduce any overly large areas and trim the glow away from the bottom edges of the larger drops.

Step 8:

Now all that you need to do is fine-tune the different layers; for example, adjusting colours or shrinking highlights. You may also want move the Drops Back layer down a few pixels to look more realistic.

Step 9:

This is the most important step; Play! Try different variations of colours, shapes etc. to see what works best for you. Don’t feel constrained to these instructions either, just by experiment with different methods of highlighting and orders of lightness you can create an entirely different aesthetic for the same humble effect.

Posted at 3:46 pm in Photoshop, Tutorials.