River Habitat, watercolor background; starting point

This is what the River section background looked like before reworking it.
In fact it what you see here actually HAS been altered: I erased the sky I had painted and added a digital sky, as you can probably tell.
You can see some of the watercolor form in the background of the river section, but it is quite obscured by what was added over it later. This sort of watercolor was done loosely on board at about 30 inches wide. It then gets enlarged to cover an area of about 17 feet in the mural.

You can see even in the post below that I changed a lot of the tree trunks. I found that they vary quite a bit in real life and many species are difficult to tell apart. For the mural however I tried to be consistent in order for species to be recognizable.