Water, the Imperfect Mirror

Making color sketches in the field for use later in your studio is a proven and time-honored practice by landscape artists. This technique probably yields the best results one can achieve short of making your final painting entirely on-site. One aspect of the nature of light is that water is an imperfect mirror that narrows your range of values. Watch for this when you are in the field.

Imagine that you are actually viewing the scene pictured at right. If you look carefully, the reflection of the trees shows you some interesting things. One is that the darkest areas (like the area marked "A") is noticeably lighter in the reflection than the source area on land. The darkest areas of a scene, when reflected in a body of water will always appear lighter than the original source. Now compare the area and reflections of "B" and "C." These demonstrate how the lightest areas of a scene, when reflected in water, will almost always be somewhat darker than their sources.

What the imperfect-mirror surface of the lake is doing here is narrowing the range of value of the light that is being reflected to your eye. See the 2 value strips top and bottom? The land area strip is longer than the poorly-reflected strip. The range from the lightest light in the reflection to the darkest dark in the reflection strip is much shorter than the original. The range is not compressed, the 2 ends have been cut off. This effect is near zero in the middle of the value range — near 50% value, like the dark tree trunk at far left.

Prove it to yourself in the field. Look for the darkest area of a scene that is reflected in a body of water (I always start with the darkest dark when I'm painting, anyway). You will see that it loses some punch in the reflection. If you have to rely on photos as reference you should remember this shortening of the value range and adjust your mixing. Photographs are rather poor at preserving such subtle differences in a scene — especially in the darks. Remember that!