Rocks in the Bow River

12 x 16 Acrylic on canvas paper.

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Comment by Gregg S. Geary on June 11, 2012 at 1:11: Tammy. I have seen some pictures in galleries here in Hawaii that are not as good as your rocks underwater selling for many hundreds of dollars so I think you should keep at this. I was painting at the beach this morning and when I walked over to the shoreline by a retaining wall I looked down and saw pretty much what you captured in your painting. The water was a beautiful glass green with rocks underneath. If you have any advice on capturing that in paints let me know. I think the reflected light on the water would be really tricky. Was it?

Comment by Tammy Wolcott on June 10, 2012 at 23:04: Thanks Gregg. I know what you mean about the rocks sitting on top. I think I should have maybe painted them below the water (more rounded) and then put a light wash of the green water over the bottom part. I plan on doing more paintings of rocks in water and will try doing that next time. I was a geologist and it seems that almost all of my paintings have rocks in them so I want to try to capture them correctly. This was the first time I had painted reflections in the water and it was a lot of fun. I had taken the shoreline photo about a year ago and thought it would be fun to try to paint - and it was!

Comment by Gregg S. Geary on June 10, 2012 at 22:30: I think painting water is a great challenge. You did a fantastic job capturing the luminosity and reflectivity of the water and the rocks under the water. The green hues of the water make for an amazing naturalness. Well done! The only thing I notice that might be a problem for me is that the foreground rocks do not appear to be sitting in the water but seem to be floating on top of it. Richard mentioned that this is a common problem and has to do with the flat bottoms of the rocks. He indicated that rocks in water that are a distance from the viewer do have consistently flat bottoms but as they move toward the viewer they are more rounded showing that they sit into the water. Just a thought, since I could definitely not come close to the quality of your execution.