How to draw a wave

Six frames, one big breaking wave. The inside of the curl first, not the outline — and all the spray droplets in the very last frame.

This sheet takes one drawing of a large ocean wave curling over, with foam along the crest, spray in the air above it, a smaller wave behind and a band of rippled water below, and shows it six times. Each frame keeps everything the last one had and adds more.

Frame one is the inside of the wave. The long curved panels that make up the face of the curl arrive first, along with the bottom edge of the water below. The wave's outer arc — the sweeping line that everyone thinks of as the shape of a wave — is not in frame one. It does not turn up until frame four. That is the most counter-intuitive thing on this sheet and it is worth knowing at the start, because for three frames the drawing is a set of nested curves that do not obviously add up to anything.

It is also, once you get used to it, a genuinely useful way to think about a breaking wave. The face of a wave is a curved sheet of water and the curl is that sheet folding over on itself, so the concentric curves down the face are the actual structure and the outline is only where the structure stops. Drawing them first is closer to how the water works than drawing the silhouette and filling it in.

Frames two and three add the far-left face panel, the sides of the water below, one of the upper foam lobes, the left-hand curl and the small wave over on the right. Frame four brings the long outer arc of the crest and the foam lobes in the middle. Frame five adds two more foam blobs, the face of the small wave and a couple of ripple lines.

The last frame is the spray: every one of the round droplets flying above the crest arrives at once, together with the remaining ripple marks on the flat water. That means the drawing looks static right up to the final step and then suddenly has movement in it. Do not be tempted to sprinkle the droplets in early — they are the easiest thing on the page to overdo, and adding them last, when you can see how much white space is actually left above the crest, is the best protection against covering the sky in dots.

The reveal order runs from the largest closed shape to the smallest, which is why the inside of the curl comes before its outline and why the spray comes last. It is easy to copy from and it is not a claim that this is how a wave ought to be drawn. Most people would draw the outer arc first and work inwards, which is a perfectly good approach and reaches the same picture.

The download is one A4 page holding the six frames in plain black outline, no shading, so it prints on anything and the last frame takes colour well.

The detail that separates a convincing wave from a flat one is the foam. On this drawing the foam sits along the top of the crest as a row of overlapping rounded lobes rather than as a jagged line, and the lobes are different sizes. Drawn as a zigzag, foam reads as a saw blade; drawn as rounded lumps of uneven size, it reads as water. If you draw only one part of this sheet twice, make it that row.

Published 29 August 2026Updated 29 August 2026575 words