For this painting, I wanted to try to capture the shine that can be seen on wet rocks, and the glare on ripples of water. I found a photo online that captured these elements, and tried to paint that photo. I didn’t end up capturing the photo as well as I would have liked, and this became more of an interpretation of the photo.
I started by faithfully sketching the rocks and glare, and then very carefully masked the glare as best I could. I don’t like how the glare came out on the surface in the lower left. In the photo that was more of a bokeh effect. In this painting it doesn’t quite capture that.
The glare on the ripples is closer to what I saw in the photo, but again, not quite. I wasn’t closely painting the individual ripples as well as I would have liked, because I was painting areas that were too large. I think I need to paint much more detail right at the beginning in order to really capture that glares on the waves.
The photo also had a really beautiful depth to the right of the green rock which I didn’t capture well because I wasn’t faithful enough in my recreation of the photo.
I also noticed after I painted it, that the red rock in the upper right should have had a secondary glare, which I basically ignored.
When I got to painting the right-hand side of the green rock, I tried to add some of the waves and distortion that I saw in my mind. Unfortunately, these broken wave lines aren’t in the photo, so they are a mental construct more than anything.
I spent a lot of time with thin glazed, going back over the rocks many many times. I like the effects I got on the large green rock, and I think the waves that I dashed over the submerged rocks works ok, but in general I think I ove-worked the painting.
Once again, I’m falling asleep as I type, so I’ll stop here for now. This one gets a 7/10 for me. I have a lot more work to do before I can paint these rocks in the way I want.