How to Paint Reflections
Painting a reflection in your oil landscape requires less planning than you would expect. After taking great pains to lay in the details of your background, adding a reflection of your scene in the water can be a freeing and enjoyable exercise, using the paints you already have on your canvas to create a realistic and unifying effect.
Other People Are Reading
Things You'll Need
- Oil paint
- Water or Solvent for thinning paint
- Large flat brush
- Detail brush, round or flat
- Palette knife
- Palette
- Canvas
Instructions
-
Painting In Oil
-
1
Wait until your background is dry. In oil and acrylic, it's is best to work from the background: sky, mountains, cliffs, out-of-focus trees; to mid-ground: water and slightly closer trees and figures; to foreground: detailed trees, figures and foliage. Large bodies of water that reflect the background are painted with a slight overlap to the background, so wait for your background to dry before you lay in the water to avoid smearing your work.
-
2
Using the same colors you used to paint the sky, lay your paint in the area that will represent your body of water. This is your undercoat. For a still reflection, allow your undercoat to dry, but if you want to work wet, this allows for more blending and ripples later.
-
-
3
Using the same colors you used to paint the background subject matter, paint a rough inversion of the background scene onto the water. It can be detailed if you like, but it doesn't have to be. A clear, detailed reflection requires a little more mirroring, but a simple, realistic reflection only needs to mirror the basic shape and coloring of your background scene.
-
4
With a clean soft brush, pull the paint of the reflected image toward you.
-
5
With a slightly wet, clean, soft brush, lightly pull across the reflected image with horizontal strokes, to flatten the water.
-
6
Add your bank line. This can be green for a wooded area, or gray for a rocky cliff scene. Your bank line should slightly overlap the reflected water area and the background scene, where the water meets the landscape.
-
7
With the edge of your palette knife, run a dark line under the bank, to separate it from the water.
-
8
With the edge of your palette knife, run a thin white line under the dark line, to represent the shore's edge of the water.
-
9
Add "ripples" in the body water with light colored paint and the edge of your palette knife. Vary the weight of the line. Ripples that are closer to the foreground will have more width and be farther apart from each other.
-
10
Add your foreground when your reflected area is dry.
-
1
Tips & Warnings
Reflections on bodies of water reflect straight down. The more you pull the colors of your reflected image downward and horizontally, the more you indicate movement in the water.
Keep your brushes clean to avoid muddying your paints.
References
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
