How to Paint Ocean Waves with Acrylics

Start on the palette. Mix a midtone from phthalo blue, phthalo green, and a little white. Make a dark tone with just phthalo blue and phthalo green and a tiny touch of white. Add more white to the midtone for a light tone. Then mix a sky color from phthalo blue and white. Four little piles and you are ready to paint the whole scene.

Load the sky color onto your number 2 fan brush and paint the top third of the canvas. This is your horizon and open sky, so keep it smooth and even. Do not overthink it. A flat band of soft blue is all you need up here to sit behind the wave.

Switch to the dark tone and turn the fan brush on its flat side. Drag it straight across to set a clean horizon where the water meets the sky. Work quickly so the paint stays wet. That wet edge is what lets you blend the water tones into each other in the next steps.

Take your lightest tone and lay it in all along the bottom of the canvas. As you brush, think about the direction the water is moving and let your strokes follow it. You are not just filling space here. Those angled strokes start to read as flowing water before you have even shaped the wave.

Go back to your darkest tone and sketch the top edge of the wave. Then start shaping the curl, glancing at the reference photo to match the form. Use the sharp edge of the fan brush to pull those straight lines that give the wave its texture. Keep every stroke moving in the direction the wave is breaking.

Now the fun part. Dip into bright white and dimple it along the crest where the wave is crashing. Use the flat bulk of the fan brush and press it against the canvas rather than stroking. That pressing motion breaks up the paint and gives you that frothy, chaotic foam look right at the top of the wave.

Bring that white down into the water below the crest. Start with back-and-forth strokes to suggest churning foam, then tap the flat side of the brush to build broken texture. This is where the wave stops looking flat and starts to feel like moving water with foam scattered across the surface.

For the last touches, water down some white and tap the brush near the canvas to fling a fine spray of droplets, just like the mist in the reference photo. Add a hazy layer of thin white where you see it, then come back with pure white to sharpen your brightest highlights. Step back and you have a vibrant crashing wave.