Lagoon

I wanted to do some kind of landscape study, but didn't really know what to do.  I started searching for references and came up with this:  (it is a free wallpaper from somewhere)  I liked the composition and the rocks were great!

ohh also I discovered an amazing 19th century painter by the name of Thomas Moran, who painted absolutely beautiful landscapes.  anyway:

reference -->

after spending a long time trying to just get a basic black and white value base down I got to this point:

Obviously I wasn't painting it to be exact.  I really enjoy finding out where the process takes me.

like this!  I thought that the rock coming up out of the water looked like a skull of a dragon or a dinosaur.  so I added more jagged rocks protruding from the water below.  The rocks are feeling pretty bland at this point. I have't built up the technique of rendering rocks quite yet, although I have some basic blocky values that I like.

one of the things that has helped me the most (as I've mentioned in previous posts)  Is watching Feng Zhu render paintings.  he will always "push"  back the background to lower values and make the foreground elements pop more.  I think it gave my painting a really cool feel there in the back so far.

Because the rocks were feeling dull i placed an AWESOME  rock texture over the whole piece and then masked out the areas i didn't want masked out.  and then for the back ground i masked it out a little bit more so it showed up less.  I'm excited to see where this one takes me in the next couple of days.  I should be done pretty quickly.  there is something missing and I'm not sure what it is.  I'll figure it out seen enough.