I started a piece last night that I thought really had potential, but I wasn’t having a lot of luck adding color with the brushes. I wanted a much lighter touch, so I thought about stuff over the night and most of today. I figured if I got to the pixel level I should be able to be extremely selective with the color. Unfortunately I didn’t make sure that I had the setting and size for print, so I will need to redo this if I want to print it out – and I’m thinking this could be an interesting entry for Fish Follies in Alaska.

Here’s the original piece of fabric:

This piece was done as part of an order for Australia, but we weren’t totally pleased with it – kind of muddy. I did some work brightening and using the adjustments, so then I ended up with this, which will probably be a card:

Then I did the sharpening and the blur and the invert and got a piece that looked very much like water. So I played with some “sand” to see what would happen, and then almost pixel by pixel I added three different shades of water. I wanted to keep most of the white and just add shades, so I tried different brush sizes, shades, and opacity, with a lot of erasing! I am pleased with the result:

Now I am thinking if I redo this, I can make the “sand” more cliffs, and then really darken the water and have a good strong piece for Alaska.