...
...I started to shade things in and work out the rest of the composition. I kept in mind the goal of leaving space for the title and author until I started to get carried away in the first picture.
...I intended to put the title in the upper left corner and the author in the lower right, but as you see I started to build an undersea city down there. I had visions of several towers and weird bubble-shaped buildings filling the lower section of the painting. I caught myself before I went too far and kept it simpler.
...In the second picture I started adjusting colors and pushing values in several directions just to see what other options there were.
...I didn't know how I was going to do the surface water – that is, the surface water as seen from under the surface. I avoided looking at anything at first, just to see what I would come up with using only pre-conceived misconceptions about what it would look like (I suppose I didn't learn anything from the nautilus incident.) I blatently hadn't gone for reference at this point.
