Holy foxgloves, I finally finished this beast.

Yeah, so, every so often, I take more or less everything I've learned artwise thus far and incorperate it into one arty endeavour, which is always a picture of a generic feral red fox taking a drink from a river.

There's...4 or 5 of these that I can remember doing in the past...and there's only 2 of those that I still possess today.

They're an excellent gauge of how much I've improved over the years and also a great way to look at what I want to work on improving upon next.

This was the perfect opportunity to utilize GIMP's ability to allow me to work on several layers to it's fullest potential, allowing me to see where everything is in real time and go into a depth of detail I could only dream of in my previous tool of the trade, the hell-spawn of all arty programs, Microsoft Paint.

I've also tried a couple of new arty ideas I've never tried before but may utilize again because they worked quite well.

I've also unlocked two neat tricks hidden amongst GIMP's vast selection of arty tools that also worked very well indeed.

I also realised something during the creation of this pic.

So one of the new arty ideas I've tried is not using a black outline on everything solid, and instead outlining them with a slightly darker shade of each object's colour...this has proven to "soften" the appearance of each object and make it look much more natural...especilly the hills in the background...definatly something to make use of again.

Another new arty idea is more variety with any trees I draw...not just with adding more species, as with incorperating the willow tree there, but also with giving each foreground tree a few unique characteristics to make them look more "real"...because real trees are not all blobs of green on the end of a long, vertical log.

Speaking of the willow tree...I've only draw one once before...and it didn't even look much like a willow tree...this one looks way much more like how a willow tree is supposed to look...I tried something with green lines "hanging" offa brown lines to look like leaves and it seems to have worked pretty well, though I think I best research how to draw willows a bit more. Look out for that in the future.

Now on to the two new neat tricks I've unlocked with Gimp...

The first neat trick is the airbrush tool...spraying white for the clouds...when I saw how it sprayed on, starting off transparent and then going more opaque the longer you held down the mouse button over the area, my mind was blown...doing clouds with that thing actually made something that looked very much like real clouds! Woo!

The second neat trick is with the pencil tool...it has this drop-down menu providing several different "brushes"...including one called "Galaxy (AP)"...
Galaxy (AP) brush + Green colour selected = instant leaves on trees. Eeeyup.

Now for the thing I realised during the creation of this pic...it was after I had added shading to one of the trees...I added a new layer to add highlights...you know, making the opposite sides of the tree from the shadows lighter coz the light source is shining down on them from there...but when I saw the highlights added, I realised that it just didn't look right at all...I realised that, really, Highlights were unnecessary because the un-shaded areas were light enough already, and that only shiney objects really needed a lighter shade of their colour...
...at least, that's what I think I realised...though now that I think back I probably just didn't bring layer opacity down low enough...
...*facepaws*...
...well, too late now...I'd need everything in the pic in seperate layers again to try to add highlights again and I deleted the gimp WIP file after merging them into a single layer PNG copy for the upload.

I'm still so friggin' in love with GIMP's layer opacity tool...useful for shading AND for making water transparent as it is in real life...
...although the water doesn't really look very realistic in any other respect, does it? The ripples are just little blue lines...
...that's another thing I should look into...how to do more realistic river water ripples...

...so what else did I do wrong with this picture?

Well, other than the fox's nose being a little bit too big...(I really should know better on that)...not to mention said nose being a bit wonkey, not much as far as I can see.

So yeah...all constructive critique welcome...it helps me improve.