I make it a bit 3D…..I use lots of paint so that it actually rises up on the surface.

I usually paint water that invites the viewer to touch.

Here are some I took, might give you some ideas ..

You as the artist are making choices. If you are slaving yourself to realism, that is a choice, and you need to recognize it as a choice that you are making. Do not succumb to any guilt trip that you are “supposed to” be realistic, or that you “must use” what you see in front of you, or what’s in your photo. These are all choices, including the conscientious desire to paint things realistically as you see them because you happen to like them.

I’m prepared to take the unusual step of showing my own work regarding the subject of “water”, because I went through something similar regarding this, in the last major painting I did several years ago. So here find the subject attached, “Orange Lake”. There is no lake. It is my Mom’s rose garden, but I simply did not want to do everything I was seeing, as that would have been way too boring to me. I do not want all the blades of grass, bleh! Please find attached also the reference image of what I was painting. However I did not paint from an image, I painted from life. The photo is what I was looking at.

Now the major point: what is “water”, in our human perception? Water is first and foremost a surface reflection. Anything that resembles surface reflection, becomes “water” to our visual system. I have been painting various kinds of made-up “water”, as reflection on the ground or “floor”, ever since high school. I have an old Francis Bacon inspired self-portrait of me melting away as a corpse in a chair that’s sitting in a whole room full of water. I figured out a long time ago, from all those painter TV shows like with Bill Alexander that “water” is one of the easiest things you can feed to the human visual system.

Water is often a surface disturbance as well. My “water” tends to have something of the visual effect of ripples in it. The eye is made to zigzag. This isn’t necessarily some realistic zigzag, like you’ve somehow managed to reproduce every ripple upon a lake as your eye or a camera saw it. It is a psychological zigzag. I’m going to make your eye move back and forth, as though you are tracking the surface of rippled water. I’m going to make you look at things going larger to smaller. These sorts of eye movement effects, my sense of placement for one thing vs. another, is pretty core to my work. If you’re wondering why some blotch is or isn’t there, why there is in some sense the quality of looking at a camouflague pattern, none of that is accidental. I may start with something random-ish from an underpanting, but by the time I sign my name on a canvas, every last stroke of that “water” is deliberate and intended.

What colors are in “water” ? Well hopefully I just proved to you, any damn thing you want them to be, as long as you are not chasing high fidelity parameters of realism. I am far more Impressionist and Fauvist in my core influences. Nevertheless, I wanted to point out that half of what you are seeing in this painting is real. That’s what I saw. There’s the reference photo if you’re wondering at the truth of what I saw. And if it’s not “as good” realism as someone else saw, frankly this is less about what I could do, and more about how much time I was willing to spend on the project. I’m still not a quick painter and ultra-meticulous realism would take me a lot longer to render. Even the Impressionist stuff you see before you was a 40 hour project. I didn’t sell that painting, I gave it to my Mom as a gift, so I didn’t exactly have a profit motive to continue with yet more high fidelity realistic rendering. In other words, “Good Enough”.

I love this painting by Henri Matisse, and may yet do “this kind” of water someday. My Mom has had fish ponds with exactly those kinds of fish colors and murk colors in them. Or if not, they’ve existed in various parks in various cities I’ve lived in.

In summary, for me, water is a psychological container for emotional mood, and a vehicle to express eye movement and color as pure 2D design elements. These are choices, and you can choose it too! Or not. If you hanker for more realistic water, go to a museum and stare at all the 19th century painters who did a really excellent job at various kinds of water. I like the really creepy water ala “Ophelia”.

And sometimes water really is silty & dirty like after hard rains or flooding…
If you show one of your refs , we might have more specific thoughts for it…

If the water is clear and you are looking straight down at it, you are seeing the color of the bottom. It can be very hard to make a pleasing color match for mud on the river bottom.

That fact does not obligate you to make an ugly painting.

Tonal values are more important than colors. Get the light and dark passages right and the colors will take care of themselves.

My suggestion for this picture is to interpret the ripples as a light blue to indicate the sky reflection, and paint the rest of the water as grey with a slight green/brown. Making a quick sketch with the colors can yield ideas.

Tonal values are more important than colors. Get the light and dark passages right and the colors will take care of themselves.

I agree that value contrast would be a valid way to take on this subject. For instance, one might make the body of the water mostly dark browns, darker than what is actually in the photo. That would make the birds pop more.

However, one could also go in pure color theory directions where value is not important or the arbiter. The water could be entirely fetid pastels. That would make the dark parts of the birds, pop.

There are many very outlandish things you could do, but they would require a deft handling of color theory to pull off.

At least you’ve got some high contrast birds, they’re inherently interesting as is. Support that somehow.