Paint Reflection in Water

Here's about how to paint reflection in water.

This watercolor painting shows three ways of teaching reflects the water. I use the photo for the three methods, so you can easily compare the results. The goal is to learn different methods of painting water, so it can be different or how you choose to approach you like best or only way.

I took the picture of the windmill as the subject of this sport because it is only slightly more interesting than a normal home and away with the complications added to your corner right there!

Using a pencil, lightly draw an outline of a windmill (as shown above) onto your sheet of watercolor paper. Draw it three times in a row, then draw a reflection version under the left-hand windmill only.

Paint the windmills using my colors as shown, or select your own. Don't worry about doing anything fancy, this is just an exercise to show how things work. Each area is just filled in with a flat wash.

The colors I've used are:

• Sky: cerulean blue
• Foreground: cadmium yellow and cerulean blue
• Bushes: cadmium yellow and ultramarine
• Windmill sails: raw sienna
• Windmill building: burnt sienna
• Windmill door, windows, and top: burnt sienna and ultramarine

Now you've got the first reflected windmill painted and it has dried, it is just a simple matter of painting the water surface. This is done by laying down a cerulean blue wash over the entire water area, going right over the reflected windmill itself as well are the reflected foreground and bushes.

This dulls the reflected windmill colors and makes them look as if they are in water – just what you want to achieve.

Using your same colours and using small horizontal stokes, paint in the windmill and then the water. You may want to mark a few pencil dots where various parts of the windmill will be in the reflection, to act as guides.

Don’t bend your wrist as you paint these lines, or they will end up as curves rather than straight lines. Instead, hold the brush firmly and swing your whole hand gently from your elbow.

This technique is the least predictable, but produces a very realistic result. We are going to work wet in wet, laying down the blue water first and then dropping in the windmill.

Have your paper lying flat for this technique. Lay down a wash of cerulean blue over the whole water area, and then wait for a little until this begins to dry. If you go in too soon with other colours they will spread to far and fade to nothing, and if you go in too late the paint may cause cauliflowers and backruns to form, or just not blend at all.