in the foreground!

No matter the medium, it is pretty damn difficult to master painting realistic water and especially scattered light on the water. Most are too heavy handed and it all turns to mud, forcing the artist to scrape it all off and start over again!

Oil paint, by its very nature, is thick and opaque. So masterfully thinning it out enough to perfectly reflect light and the reflections of surrounding features on it while still keeping the background color shining through is truly incredible! To actually do it so well that it looks like a photograph, is that much more so.

That's not even taking into account mixing the right colors to capture the water. Most people paint water in shades of blue, but water isn't actually blue, it's clear just like clean water coming out of your faucet.

Open bodies of water reflect the sky, so appear to be various shades of blue or gray mixed with relections of puffy, white clouds and the sun, depending on the weather.

However, shady scenes with ponds, streams, brooks, or swampy water puddles surrounded by trees in various states of seasonal color or undress (chuckle) as in winter, will more often have brackish colored water (because of the earth beneath it showing through and less blue sky reflections). The water will show reflections of the surrounding trees, leaves, bushes, buildings, rocks, etc and the dappled sunlight peeking through the canopy of leaves.

The base color of water in shady, wooded spaces is probably the hardest to capture as a result, especially with oil paints. Add to that all of the reflections, shadows, and light dancing of of the water and you've got a real challenge to make it look real like a photograph.

Watercolors, while overall more difficult to master due to their unforgiving nature, are far easier to use to best represent scenes with water, particularly where water meets a sandy beach. That's because most watercolor paint is translucent and shows what is beneath it (which is also what makes it so unforgiving of mistakes).

Using staining watercolor pigments* for the base underneath the water, letting it fully dry, and THEN lightly glazing** over it with a thinned translucent paint works exceedingly well in capturing the elusive nature of water.

Unfortunately, oil paint cannot do that very easily because all pigments are heavy and opaque. It requires expertise in thinning mixed paint and applying the intended glaze very carefully over fully dried paint to avoid mixing rather than glazing.

Below applies only to watercolors.

*staining watercolor pigments like dark Alizarin Crimson or any of the Phalo colors:

• Pros: Excellent for rich glazing, building deep shadows, creating vibrant first washes, and layering without turning muddy.

• Cons: Difficult to fix mistakes or lift out highlights once the paint dries on the paper.


**glazing

refers to applying a thin, translucent layer of paint over a completely dry base coat. Because staining paints lock firmly into the surface fibers or substrate and resist lifting when wet, layering a translucent color over them allows the two colors to blend optically. Light passes through the top translucent layer, reflects off the staining layer below, and creates a luminous, deep, and multidimensional color effect.