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.