The second week, Lonni (our instructor) suggested we pick up some inspiration pictures of landscapes from her stack, and paint a landscape that included four elements: Sky, stone, trees and water. “If you can paint those, you can paint any landscape.”
When I’d finished the sky, rocks, trees, and water of landscape below, it looked unbalanced. All the attention went to the waterfall. The expanse of bare rock face needed something in the bottom left hand corner to draw the eye. I considered adding a person, sitting there and looking at the cascade. Instead, I chose (no surprise) a dragon. It would make the second painting a companion piece to the first dragon painting. And it gave me a reason to use contrasting reds and golds.
To figure out the stance and the scale, I used a picture of a sunbathing cormorant as a model and morphed it to match the dragon of my first painting. As I painted it, it came to me the creature wasn’t sunbathing, it was displaying. The target of its display is barely visible, a red-gold dot among the trees on the other side of the falls.
(Copyright 2019)
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KEYAN BOWES 
Love the colors