Both Pieces Done

I am calling them done, even though they are not exactly the way I originally envisioned them. One of the most fascinating aspect of karsts formations are the gnarly trees, hanging on for dear life on the eroded substrate. Unfortunately I tried several approaches and couldn't get it right. So bare karsts it is! I also tried several ways to represent the shimmering water, but they didn't work out either.

What did work out was the bright red raft - looks really cool against the monochromatic scheme.

As opposed to the subdued raft, which looks subdued.

I found some leaf skeletons from the yard and brushed them with gel medium, and stitched them onto the left karst. I think they look fine.

I will review them tomorrow and hopefully they will still look ok. Now onto the research paper...

EGA MC Craftsman Second piece

The first piece is almost finished. I have figured out how to do the vegetation for the karst (I hope!) but I will wait till both pieces are done before proceeding. Same for the boat/raft.
Here's the first piece.

The second piece is started - color scheme is black and grey.
Now for the water (sigh!)

On another note - I had a hard drive crash and spent 2 days trying to recover. The latest backup I had was a month old; fortunately I keep a lot of my important stuff on OneNote in OneDrive.

Here's a public service comment:
1. Do backup!
2. Practise restoring from backup before it is actually required!!
After much gnashing of teeth and renting of old T-shirts, I finally came up with a process that worked - but it would have been a lot easier if I had actually tried out restoring files before today - instead of trusting the manual's instructions.
Right now the restoring is still chugging away, and probably will run overnight. And then I will have to reconfigure the drives, etc. I hope I haven't lost the preliminary paper I started for the MC Color submission, but I won't find out till I have everything restored.