"Stone Gathering" original oil 6x6"

The exercise that worked me the most with this piece was arranging the stones in an interesting way. I started with them in a glass dish, but I really loved the light reflecting up from the cloth into their shadow sides which you couldn't see in the dish. It is interesting to take a square format and a bunch of little shapes and figure out how to fill the space effectively. It took about 7 or 8 attempts to find something I liked, this is an exercise one could do again and again to develop their design skills.