Drawing water is a challenge so you need to have a plan of how you are going to achieve drawing a body of water.

I made a line drawing of the major shapes, they are basic shapes so although there are a large amount of them, they are easily replicated, just ensure they get bigger as they appear closer to the front of the composition. When I work on a drawing, whatever the subject matter, I use watercolour cold press paper as I like to pick up on the texture.

Once I had drawn the rock face, and the rocks I was ready to make sense of the shapes. I used a soft B pencil to draw the rock face, using vertical pencil strokes. I then lightly shaded in the rock shapes. I used graphite powder to make the shapes in the sky. I used stipple pencil strokes to make the marks on the rocks.

This all took around one and a half hours. What I needed to do now was add the magic ingredient: the water.

I took a very soft tissue and scrunched it up into a soft ball shape. I rubbed the tissue, very softly, into the paper, using a circular motion. I needed some value from the pencils to work from, a move away from the starkness of the colour of the paper, even though it is not “white”. I used this technique all over the drawing, excluding the sky area.

I then took a rubber top pencil and started very softly erasing the graphite, using my photographic reference as a guide for the flow of the water. I started on the waterfall first, then the spray on the ground level, and then the water around the rocks in the background, and then in the foreground.