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How to Draw a Water Drop in Coloured Pencil

By Peter Weatherill

In short

A water drop has no colour of its own: it takes the colour of whatever it sits on. Render it with four rules, a bright highlight on the lit side, a shadow opposite, a surprising shadow across the top and a bright highlight along the bottom, both caused by light refracting through the water. Get those right and a drop looks wet and round on any leaf or petal.

This is a coloured pencil demonstration by Peter Weatherill of one of the most useful small skills you can learn: painting a believable water drop. Once you have it, you can add raindrops to any picture of flowers or leaves and they instantly bring it to life.

The key idea is that a water drop has no colour of its own. It simply adopts the colour of the surface underneath, so a droplet on the paintwork of a car is just the colours of the car, and a droplet on a leaf is greens and browns, with a touch of sepia in the darkest parts. Peter worked this example with Faber pencils on plain white card. The same rules apply in watercolour, though there you may need masking fluid early on to reserve the space where the drop will sit.

Where we are heading: a single drop on a leaf, made convincing by light and shadow rather than by any colour of its own.

The one big idea: a raindrop is not blue, or grey, or clear. It is the colour of whatever is underneath it, lit and distorted by the water. Paint the leaf, then paint what the water does to it.

The four rules of a water drop

Why this matters

First decide where your light comes from, a light pencil arrow you can rub out later will remind you. Everything else follows from that one decision.

Peter's map of a single drop: a top highlight on the lit side, a shadow opposite, a refracted shadow across the top, the darkest shadow where the drop meets the surface, and a refracted highlight along the bottom.

1A shadow opposite the light

There is a shadow underneath the drop and to the side opposite the light, or directly underneath if the light is straight above. This is the drop's own cast shadow, and the darkest of all is the line where the drop meets the surface.

2A highlight on the lit side, on top

There is a bright highlight on the top of the drop, towards the side the light is coming from. This is simply the light source itself, reflected in the curved top of the water. Leave it as bare white paper.

3A shadow on top (the surprising one)

There is also a shadow across the top of the drop. This seems wrong, but it is caused by light refracting up through the water from the shadowed surface below. It is what tells the eye the drop is rounded and full.

4A highlight along the bottom

Finally, there is a bright highlight along the bottom edge of the drop. This too is refraction, the light source shining through the water and gathering at the lower rim. It is the touch that makes the drop glow.

Two more things to remember

Any pattern on the surface below, a leaf vein, say, is magnified by the drop and will not line up where you would expect; it bends and shifts as it passes under the water. And because the drop concentrates the light, the surface it covers is lighter in tone than the surface around it.

One last thing: real water drops are not all neat rounds and ovals. Let yours sit and spread a little.

Drawing it step by step

1Block in the leaf, save the drop

Lightly draw the edges of the leaf and the droplet, then shade the leaf with a first, even layer of your base green. Leave the veins as clear paper, and leave the whole drop as a clean white reserved shape: that white is doing nothing yet, but you will need it.

First colour layer on the leaf, veins left as clear paper and the drop reserved as a white oval.

2Darken the leaf and define the veins

Progressively build up the leaf, deepening the green and giving it form, and define the veins more clearly as you go. The drop is still just white paper at this stage. The stronger and more three-dimensional the leaf, the more convincing the drop will look once it sits on it.

The leaf darkened and the veins defined. Everything is ready for the drop to go on top.

3Put in the first parts of the drop

Now work the drop using your four rules. Lay in the soft shadow inside the lower part of the drop and the cast shadow on the surface opposite the light, and start the refracted shadow across the top. Keep the two highlights, top and bottom, as clean paper. Use the colours of the leaf underneath, greens and browns, not grey.

The first parts of the drop: shadows placed, highlights reserved. Already it begins to sit on the leaf.

4Intensify the shadows

Deepen the shadows, especially the dark line where the drop meets the leaf and the refracted shadow across the top. Add a touch of sepia in the very darkest parts. The contrast between these darks and the bright reserved highlights is what makes the water look glassy and full.

Shadows intensified. The drop now reads as rounded and wet, catching the light top and bottom.

5Finish, and let the leaf show through

Bring everything up together: strengthen the leaf around the drop, let the magnified leaf surface show faintly through the water, and keep the area inside the drop a touch lighter than the leaf around it. Soften any hard pencil edges so the water looks like water, not glass with a line round it.

The finished drop: leaf colours showing through, two clean highlights, a deep meeting-shadow, and the surface beneath gently magnified.

Carol's note: trust the strange bits

The two rules that feel wrong, a shadow on the top of the drop and a highlight along the bottom, are exactly the two that sell it. Our instinct says light on top, shadow at the bottom, and a drop drawn that way looks like a flat grey blob. It is the refraction, light bending as it passes through the water, that flips them, and your eye reads "that's wet" without knowing why. So when it feels counterintuitive, you are probably getting it right. And take Peter's advice: practise the whole thing with an ordinary graphite pencil first, until the four rules are second nature. Then you can drop a believable raindrop onto anything.

Common mistakes

Colouring the drop grey or blue

A drop has no colour of its own. Use the colours of the surface underneath, greens and browns on a leaf, and let light and shadow do the rest.

Light on top, shadow underneath, and nothing else

That gives a flat blob. You need the refracted pair too: a shadow across the top and a highlight along the bottom. Those two make it read as water.

Losing the highlights

Reserve the top and bottom highlights as clean white paper from the start. Trying to lift them out later rarely gives the same clean sparkle.

Veins running straight under the drop

Water magnifies and bends the surface beneath it. Shift and enlarge any vein where it passes under the drop, or the illusion of depth is lost.

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Coloured Pencil Techniques

Layering, burnishing and building depth, the core skills behind the leaf and the drop here.

Draw reflections in water

Once you understand how your viewpoint shapes what the water shows you, reflections start making sense.

A Glass of Tomatoes

Take transparency further: glass and reflections in coloured pencil on black paper.

Still Life Objects to Draw

More small subjects to practise on, where light and surface do all the work.

portrait of the author Carol Leather

I'm Carol Leather, a coloured pencil artist for over 15 years. Most of my teaching comes back to the same idea: realistic coloured pencil starts with structure, light and observation long before the colour goes down.

My work has featured in Ann Kullberg's Color Magazine, CP Magic and Color Pencil Treasures (vol 7). I'm a member of the UKCPS and was a prize winner in the Nature section of their Annual Open Exhibition in 2020.