How to Paint Reflections in Watercolour

The Mistake Most Painters Make

The instinct, when you spot a reflection, is to paint a second version of the scene — upside down. That is exactly where it goes wrong. A reflection is not a picture of a building or a tree; it is a record of light bouncing off a surface, and it is always softer, simpler and more broken up than the thing it mirrors.

If you find yourself carefully drawing window frames into the water below a shopfront, step back and squint. The moment you start describing detail in a reflection, you have stopped painting water and started painting a duplicate. Reflections reward restraint more than any other subject in watercolour.

Read the Reflection as a Shape, Not a Scene

Before you mix a single colour, ask what the reflection is doing as a shape on the paper. Squinting collapses the scene into bands of tone, and you will usually find the reflection is one or two simple blocks rather than a jumble of objects.

• Tone: reflections are generally darker than the object but lighter than you expect — particularly in flat afternoon light, where the water's own colour lifts everything.
• Colour: they lean cool and slightly grey, pulling towards whatever the water is tinted with. A red-brick wall reflected in a canal reads as a muted terracotta mixed with a touch of blue, never as pure brick.
• Detail: almost none. If you can see a chimney pot in the water, you are looking at a very still day indeed — and even then, it is a smudge, not a shape.

Sketch the outline of the reflection first, in pencil or with a faint wash, and check it against the object above. It should be shorter than you think, and quietly off-centre.

Horizontal Strokes and the Dragging Method

Watercolour is made for this. Load a one-inch flat brush and drag it sideways across the paper rather than pushing it along. Let each stroke touch the previous one only at its edge, so the colour bleeds just enough to bind the band together without turning it into a flat slab.

Now leave gaps. Small skips and dry spots where the brush runs out of water read instantly as ripples, and they cost you nothing. A reflection painted as one clean horizontal wash looks like a wall; a reflection painted as four or five interrupted horizontals looks like water.

For a shimmer, lay a wet-in-wet underlayer first, then add a second pass of horizontal strokes while it is still damp, offsetting each one slightly — like brickwork. The pigment will soften at the edges on its own and give you that gentle sideways drift.

Four Situations, Four Approaches

• Still water — canal, lake, millpond: long, unbroken horizontals with very few gaps. Reflections of posts and mooring rings become vertical smears pulled down a short distance, fading as they descend.
• Moving water — river, sea, a breezy day: shorten the strokes dramatically and break them up. More gaps, more overlap, less control. Speed here is your friend.
• Glass — windows, mirrors, shopfronts: the reflection sits on the surface, so paint it last. Once the interior is dry, float a thin glaze of sky colour across the pane, keeping the top edge crisp and letting the lower edge soften into the frame.
• Wet streets: think vertical, not horizontal — long smears of colour dragged downwards from kerbs and shopfronts towards the gutter. Leave a few patches of dry pavement between them and those un-painted areas will read as puddles catching the light.

Edges, Tone and Knowing When to Stop

The single most useful rule is this: hard edge where the reflection meets the object, soft edge where it fades away. In still water the join at the waterline is sharp and dark; the bottom of the reflection dissolves. Paint the join first while the paper is dry, then work downwards into damp paper.

If a reflection has gone too heavy, let it dry and lift it with a thirsty brush — one that has been dampened and blotted on kitchen paper until it is barely moist. A light dab will pull out tone without scrubbing the surface. Lift horizontal bands, never circular patches.

And stop earlier than feels comfortable. A reflection that is 80 per cent resolved will suggest water convincingly. One at 100 per cent will look like a photocopy.

A Simple Palette and a Five-Minute Exercise

You need very little. Payne's Grey or a neutral grey mixed from ultramarine and burnt umber is the backbone. Add cerulean or a cool blue for sky reflections, a warm earth for brickwork and roofs, and one stronger accent — a viridian or a deep rose — for the odd flash of colour that gives the water life. Keep them all slightly desaturated; reflections are quieter than the world above them.

Try this before your next painting. Draw three rectangles about 5cm tall. In the first, paint long unbroken horizontals for still water. In the second, short broken strokes for a breezy river. In the third, vertical downward smears for a wet street. Same pigments, same brush, three different moods. Once you have felt that difference in your hand, reflections stop being a puzzle and become one of the most enjoyable things you can paint.