Some things I learned and noticed throughout this project were brush techniques, blending colors, and contrast. Brush techniques have helped me a lot, especially when it came to painting the sea. I learned that smaller stokes in the back and larger ones in the front makes the sea look much more realistic. I'm aware that the goal isn't to make it look realistic, but I feel like this makes the painting come together much better. Me learning how to blend colors might sound a bit weird, but what I mean is I learned how to get different shades from one color and get the specific color I want from 1 or 2 tries, not 12. The third thing I learned, was thinking of contrast often when I was painting my sea. Painting my sea was the most difficult part of this whole project, and thinking of all the “rules” whilst doing it. Some of them were like painting at a diagonal angle, making the strokes smaller the farther away the horizon is, and more contrast in the front and less in the back. Brush work was a really important part of my painting as it gave it more depth and detail. For the gradient in the sky, I first just did some big strokes, but that didn’t look that well. After learning how to make it better, I used the wet-on-wet technique, which made the gradient look much more like a gradient and the colors looked better and blended. Another technique I used to make the tress in the background was just making a bunch of small irregular lines, then a fat line underneath it. Then I dried my brush and soaked up the color under the spikes to make a “mini gradient”. For the sea, I painted the whole sea pink because there were more pink highlights than depths. So I just made dark blue strokes that were thick and kept getting thinner as they kept going farther back. Some unexpected challenges that came up for me were getting the specific color I needed and painting the sea. The specific color was the pink that was between the purple and the main pink in the gradient. I spent almost an entire class on trying to get that exact color, but then a classmate helped me. She taught me how to see what color I need to add to my “mixture” in able to make it the color I want it to be. When I was painting the sea, I did not understand how to do it. If you look at my first full painting, you can see that I went over the sea many times that the paper started to break down and the sea had more blue than what it had pink. My teacher taught me how to use contrast when painting the sea, and that helped it look much more realistic.