Now I'm working on the preliminary for the otter commission, but I couldn't give it my full attention until I did a repair job. Last year I did a Pacific reef painting where I tried to keep the background sparse. Well, it was a little too sparse & looked too blah. I wasn't sure hot to fix it without redoing the whole picture, until I was working on the giant reef earlier this year and came up with the idea to add a few corals around the fish. I don't why it took me so long to realize I could do that.
So I've spent the last week & a half working on the new corals. I put some long blue staghorn coral through the middle and left side. On the right side are some sponges, but I had a terrible time getting their color to mesh. First I tried a yellow, but that clashed with the background, then brown, which was too muddy & finally a darker orange than that which is on the copper-banded butterflyfish.It works well with the background, yet is different enough from the fish to prevent the idea of orange running amok.

This is Before:

And this is After:

The background did not get that much darker in the actual painting, it must be the lighting when I took the photo. The new corals have made the background more complex and livens it up, I think. Hopefully, it will have a better impact on viewers, too.

It's been a busy month for me. As I mentioned in June, I was working on 2 drawings for the Cold-Blooded Creations Art Show, which is held every August in Daytona Beach Florida. I usually send a few pictures down and this year I wanted to have only new work.
In June, I finished the drawing of a blue-tongued lizard from Australia(seen at beginning of this post). The twisty tree root is what I think pulls the viewer in and it was fun to do. These are friendly lizards and even wild specimens can be very docile.
The adder picture, completed in July, was inspired by an interview with author Lisa Glass, who told about one summer when some beaches in England had an overpopulation of adders. I decided to do a picture of a snake in a place we don't often think of them, the seaside. Both pictures were done in pen & several color inks, plus an inky wash for shadows and on the adder, the dune grass was in acrylic. Both were drawn on yellowish calligraphy paper, which I like for certain subjects.

In other arty news, I was accepted into the Westlake-Westshore Arts Council annual juried show, which was this month too. The display was at a local library and was the largest show yet by that organization. My rhino drawing was among a high quality selection of pieces in various media. This show always has exceptional photographs and there was a couple I wished I could've afforded to buy.