Onion or Parfait? It's all in the layers, Shrek! 16/30

Love the Shrek movies - I can watch them over and over! I especially love how Fiona can kick serious butt and donkey is a hoot. It follows the path of other movies/TV shows that challenge our perceptions of "traditional" fairy tale, vampire, monster stories. Sometimes it is good to give traditions a smack upside the head. Makes way for new ideas!

Today's progress is a bit subtle. Glazes, shading and another layer of blue over pretty much the whole canvas. I started with mixing a little Raw Umber and Black into the Ultramarine Blue and deepending the shadows on the tall fronds to help bring the seahorses to the forefront. Love how increasing the contrast always adds depth! The depressions on the seahorse bodies also got another shading of Raw Umber with a touch of Diox Purple added - they needed to set back in as well. Some extra glazing with Ultramarine Blue underneath the seahorses helped push back and tone down the overall background. For the overall blue wash, I wet the entire canvas with a large brush then mixed the first two blues together and, with a lot of water, applied this blue to the top third of the canvas and down both sides. While the paint was still wet, I laid the canvas on the floor and liberally splashed alcohol over the whole wet canvas. When this was pretty close to being dry, the canvas went back up onto the easel to allow any wet spots to run a bit. OK - time to go do something else for awhile & let things dry - OK, we are back! The lower right corner is looking a bit bare. What to do? Since my husband dives and has tons of photos, I knew I could find some inspiration there. Flipped through a couple of his books and found several fans that had potential, so I sketched on some branchy shapes - this is pretty much an underwater tree to start with - and quickly brush sketched them in with some Raw Sienna. An easy way to get natural looking tree shapes is turn the canvas upside down and draw from the base outward. Still need to get another mixed media involved. What next?