In this picture, I tried to make reflections as the central part of my painting using the impressionistic style. As you can see from the pictures in this link, at first, I tried to do a lot of things. But then I realized that in every painting, I must focus on very few things. So, I just put in the trees, water and a swan. This is how I painted it:
1. First, I sketched everything.
2. Next I painted the trees, the sky, the land and the darkest part of the river.
3. Then I changed the river and the trees to show the effects of light and tone.
4. After that, I worked on painting the land on the other side of the river and I painted the first two colors of the first tree’s reflection.
5. I worked on all the reflections using a simple trick – Flipping the canvas over and working on it. I also painted the person. I improved the look of the trees by using yellow shades for the leaves.
6. Since the person was not really getting the amount of size and portion of the painting, I erased it.
7. Finally, I painted water on the reflections, added a swan and it reflections on the water.
8. The last step was the most important one – of course putting my signature.

I did learn that the more things you add, the longer it takes to finish. It is always better to keep the painting simple with very few objects to focus on.