Water Ripple Effect Tutorial

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1. Creating the ripples:

From Tool pallet (Window: Tools) select the Ellipse Tool (OR select this tool by pressing L) and draw a circle while holding down the Shift key.

Open the Gradient window from Window menu OR press Ctrl/Command + F9. Also open the Color pallet from the Window menu OR press F6.

In the Gradient window select Radial in Type drop down and add few color buckets to the gradient and using the Color pallet create a gradient as you can see below.

Make the Stroke to none and scale it non-uniformly.

Now the basic ripple is done!

2. Adding background:

Let’s make a background for the ripples. Add a new layer by clicking on the ‘Create New Layer’ icon on the right bottom of the Layers window and drag this new layer down to the layer having our ripple. Draw a simple rectangle in the new layer and give it a gradient from dark blue to light blue. In the Gradient window select Linear in Type drop down.

Now it is starting to take shape!

3. Even more ripples:

Now we are going to add a few more ripples. Select Pen Tool from the Tools pallet and draw few lines as shown in the picture below.

Now let’s apply a brush stroke to these lines to make these look like ripples. Select the Pen tool and draw a shape (like a sliced ellipse) with straight bottom and rounded top. You can check it below.

Open the Brushes pallet from Window menu (OR press F5). Drag your newly created shape in to the Brushes window and select New Art Brush in the New Brush window that opens up and press OK button. One more window names Art Brush Options opens up. Press OK button keeping all the options as default.

We have to apply this new brush to the additional ripples. Select all the additional ripples and click on the new brush that we just created in the Brushes window. If you notice that the ripples look too bulky, just reduce the stroke weight in the Stroke window (Window: Stroke OR Ctrl/Command + F10).

4. Coloring the ripples:

We will now fill in the ripples with some proper colors. For this we will need to convert these into a shape. So let’s select all these ripples and from Object menu select Flatten Transparency. A Flatten Transparency window will open. Make the Raster/Vector Balance 100 in this window and press OK button.

You will notice that the ripples are converted into a shape. These are one group now so let’s ungroup them. Object: Ungroup OR by pressing Ctrl/Command + Shift + G.

Select each ripple and apply suitable gradient to it. You can pick colors from our drawing. For this you need to click on any of the color bucket in the Gradient window, select the Eyedropper Tool and holding down the shift key click anywhere on the drawing to pick up the color at that point. You'll need to get a similar effect as the one you can see below.

Great, now the water ripples are ready!

5. Droplets:

I'll add some droplets to the ripples to make it look more exciting. Draw a droplet using the Pen Tool as shown below. Keep the Fill color blue and the Stroke none.

Select this droplet and from Object menu select ‘Create Gradient Mesh’. In the Create Gradient Mesh window that opens up, set the Rows to 4 and Columns to 5 and press the OK button.

You have a mesh to the droplet which you can color the way you want. With the Direct Selection Tool (the white arrow) select the center point of the second row from top and give it a white color from the Color Pallet. Then select the center point of the first row from bottom and give it a light blue color. Then move all the points to achieve the result as on the picture below. Don’t move the points on the outer edge.

Place this droplet above the ripples and drag a few copies of it by holding down the Alt/Option key while dragging.

Tadaaam! Ripple water effect & droplets, nice combination!

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