Painting water

In the good classes we have been learning about painting water. It is quite difficult. The teacher does a few strokes and a splotch and bam! sparkling waves and deep pools and endless seas. 

This is about my fiftieth try at just making something that looked like ordinary water. It turned out quite cool, but has a lot of layers for such a simple looking thing.

Ignore the mutant tree - the key with sparkling oceans is not to use any paint at all. Of course! How obvious.

And then we went down the very dodgy rabbit hole of reflections in water. Oh my stars, so many things to think about. Is the water smooth? Is it ruffled? Is the object dark (in which case the reflection is lighter) or light (in which case the reflection is darker). Put a tiny amount of the colour in the reflection, but not too much. Make all your water lines horizontal. It gets slightly darker away from you (or was it toward you? Can't remember). Yeeks.