This painting was all about symmetry and depth. I had to make sure the hills didn't look flat and I had to make sure the castle was correctly reflected in the water.
I had to build up the actual hills and then try to mirror the light and shadow on the reflection below. I did a lot of this by photographing it, inverting the image then flipping it upside down to use as a reference.
Thread: Progress photos of my self portrait as a child.
This was an important painting for me as the photo is a really happy memory of my childhood.
The problem was that although I was confident with the landscape I have very little experience drawing people... So I decided to leave the person to the end!
I wanted to capture the age of the photo so the pallette was very green and yellow.
Started out by defining the shape of the mountains. What I should have done at this stage is work out the light source. I didn't and it cost me a lot of time later.
This was all about the Blue for me. But later on I went too much into realism so had to pull it back from just being blue.