Painting #71, busy day again today

I should have painted one of the paintings I started Sunday, oh no, can't do that, had to start a whole new one, then, it is a very complicated scene, and takes me over 4 hours of my day to finish it, 2 hours of class time and 2 hours plus, at home, to complete it. Just finished it and it's technically Wednesday (12:30 a.m.), at least in Michigan it is. I'm not getting anything else done, I should be able to whip these 6" paintings out in an hour and a half, but I really get involved with them and can't let it be until it looks as close to perfect as I can get it, I've shifted things, eliminated stuff, cropped it the photo, to make the composition work, I just get so wrapped up in the thing that I just can't let it go, don't know what I can do about that either, guess that's just the way it is.

Well, again, there is no sky, so I sketched the rock shapes and the falls and water shape with the light wash before I jumped into the green for the trees at the top, I didn't really see any yellow or orange in those far trees up on the high bank in this one, but with all the warmth of the rocks I decided to put a bit of it in, if you can tell, this was late October in Minnesota, and there was a skim of ice on the river and bits of frozen ice on the rocks at the falls, I hope you can tell that. I usually lay a thin wash of the local colors over the whole thing, pretty much so you don't see any of the white of the board, and that's what I did this time too, why change the procedure if it works, then I start at the top and add a bit more definition to the trees on the top, the second layer is more defined than the first but still needs fine tuning, and the same with the rocks and moving on down through the falls and the trees on the left and the right, I really didn't work much on the foreground until I did the 3rd and 4th layers and had the whole thing pretty much done except for that, I altered the trees shapes on the right side, they were just big lumps of trees hanging over the rocks, it looked static and I decided to let some of it hang over but decided to put some tree trunks on the upper part, there were none in the actual photo, so how this works is pretty much how I want to do it, it is my painting after all, and if any one has seen this particular river and falls and says that it wasn't like that, oh well, I like it this way better. Love this one too, hope you do too.