Tiny Ripple Maker - my new digital brush

 

I have been struggling with this water for a couple of days! The basic problem is probably a perspective one. I know when I look across a lake that I will see some rippled areas and some reflection. Maybe I don't have enough space between the foreground rocks and the first far shore ( I would have to complicate it further by having two far shorelines! Sheesh!) I think that I have to make the mountain of trees on the right a paler colour to make them recede into the distance more.

 

Meanwhile I have managed to make some ripples in my water with my newly designed "Tiny Ripple Maker" brush. It is basically a Flat Grainy blender captured dab with a little random jitter on it. If you enlarge your screen view you can probably see the brush controls I used. It had the effect of moving some of the green, blue and white around to indicate tiny ripples. The red arrow shows the direction of the brush stroke. Obviously it has to be used on top of the colours already there because it does not add any more colour, it moves the coloured pixels around. 

The larger rough view below shows it more clearly.

 

 

You can, of course do this stroke by tiny stroke too! And I will probably do some of them that way for emphasis. This whole thing might get scrapped too, but I wanted to show you the techniques and tricks I try out to make the mark on the paper look the way I want it to look. You can also change this brush to a digital watercolour brush as well.