How to paint reflections in still water

Why a reflection is never a mirror

Stand at the edge of a canal on a windless morning and the water looks like glass. Look longer, and you will see it is nothing of the sort. There is always a slight breath of air, a drifting leaf, a subtle current pushing one way. The surface is a mirror only in theory; in practice it is a soft, restless, imperfect one.

That is good news for painters. A true mirror image — inverted, crisp, identical in tone — would look like a decal pasted onto the water. Real reflections are darker than the object above them, less contrasty, and often shifted towards the colour of the water itself. They break into horizontal fragments. Their edges dissolve. If you paint them as copies, the water will read as ice or as a photograph with the contrast turned up. Paint them as suggestions, and the eye will do the rest.

Read the water in three bands

Before you mix a single colour, look at the water from the far bank to your feet and divide it into three rough bands.

• The contact band. Where land meets water there is usually a darker note — a strip of shadow, wet stone, or the reflection of a bank of trees. This is the anchor that stops the reflection floating.
• The main body. Here the reflection of trees, sky and buildings sits at its most legible. Shapes are recognisable but simplified, with details missing and edges softened.
• The foreground. Close to you, ripples are larger, more sky colour appears between the reflected shapes, and sparkle begins to break up the surface.

Notice too that the length of a reflection depends on where you stand. Crouch low and the reflected tree stretches towards you; stand upright and it shortens. Choose your viewpoint deliberately, and keep it. Changing eye level halfway through a painting is one of the quickest ways to make water look wrong.

Paint the land first, then let it fall in

Work from the top down. Block in the sky, then the bank, trees or buildings above the waterline, keeping those shapes clear and firm. Then, while the lower edge of the land is still slightly damp, pull the same colours downwards into the water with vertical strokes. Immediately drag them sideways with a clean, thirsty brush so the vertical pull softens into a horizontal smudge.

Resist the urge to reproduce every branch and window. A reflection shows you where things are, not what they are. Simplify the silhouette, lose the smallest shapes entirely, and make the reflected mass slightly shorter than the object above it. Where a shape meets its reflection, leave a faintly darker or cooler line — that hinge is what makes the water read as a surface rather than a hole.

Ripples and breaks: the horizontal grammar

Almost everything happening in water runs sideways. Use the side of the brush rather than the point, and lay each ripple across the reflection rather than down it. A useful trick is to think of the reflection as a set of horizontal slices: some slices belong to the reflected object and are dark, others belong to the sky and are pale.

Where a ripple crest faces you it catches the sky and turns light; where it slopes away it shows the reflection and turns dark. Alternating those two notes in broken strokes creates movement immediately. Leave gaps between them. Dry brush dragged lightly over textured paper gives you sparkle without any fiddly detail, and a clean damp brush drawn gently across a wet edge will bite a soft channel into a reflection exactly where a breeze has troubled the surface.

Value and colour: the two giveaways

Most paintings of still water fail on value. A reflection is generally one to two steps darker than the object casting it, and its tones sit much closer together. Keep your darks transparent so the water still glows through them; thick opaque darks kill the illusion instantly in watercolour, and need careful handling in oils and acrylics.

Colour shifts as well. Reflection light has travelled through the water and back, so it arrives cooler, less saturated, and tinted by whatever the water itself is doing. A russet autumn tree reflects as a muted grey-brown with only a whisper of warmth. Mix a little of your sky colour, or the base tone you have used for the water, into every reflected colour. Never use the object's colour neat. And remember that a good part of your water is not reflecting the land at all — it is reflecting the sky. Leave those pale passages alone.

Common faults, and good outdoor habits

Watch for these, as they account for most disappointing water:

• Too much contrast. Soften with a light glaze or a damp brush.
• Too much detail. Remove it. Reflections have no sharp edges unless something is touching the surface.
• A missing sky. If every centimetre of water holds a reflected object, the picture suffocates. Leave breathing spaces.
• Overworking. Stop earlier than feels comfortable. The last ten minutes usually ruin the first hour.

Outdoors, work small and fast — a pocket sketchbook and a twenty-minute study will teach you more than a laboured afternoon. Sit or crouch low to judge the length of reflections properly, and use a card viewfinder to isolate a simple stretch of water rather than a whole lake. Note the time on every sketch; reflections change character completely within an hour as the sun moves. Between trips, practise in the garden with a washing-up bowl of water and a single potted shrub beside it. Learn to see that small patch of water honestly, and every river you meet afterwards will be easier.