This Dead Sea

I've been working on this goddamn picture off and on since December so uh... I forgot most of what I wanted to say, eheh.
The only thing that (rather sadly) excited me about this process was my revelation about HOW TO PAINT WATER. READY??

Step 1: Spend over 3 hours attempting to paint small, thin water ripples onto the background layer with black lines. Try to add in lighter highlights, too. Decide it looks absolutely terrible, and ragequit.
Step 2: Look back on the picture in a few days. Sigh and turn the water shading layer off, and start over again. Try out a new brush and go for larger areas and more flow. Add more white highlights. Realize it still looks terrible. Prepare to ragequit.
Step 3: (Accidentally) Click the first water shading layer to visible, and stop as you realize that the combined result of the two layers suddenly looks... something like water.
Step 4: Celebrate like you just won all the awards. Then promptly fall asleep.

_{...In retrospect, I really should've been able to reason this out, given that I've taken way too many courses in fluid dynamics/hydrology, and that I even remember being taught that simulation of a realistic water surface usually requires about a dozen sine/cosine equations of varying amplitudes stacked on top of each other.
(Sorry for the big, scary mathy words--now that I'm preparing to be an art student I guess I'm suddenly missing math a little, haha.)}

Anywho, there's my life lesson for y'all, if any of you ever decide you wanna try painting water.
...Which I will never again do. Not even if you paid me. In Doritos.


ANYWAY. AHEM.
Seth, from Iris. I figure he's a bit younger here, before he started inking up his arms, but hey, I guess an experience like this would just help to make him all the more world-weary and depressed, huh?
To be honest, I don't give it much focus in the story, but... the idea of a dead and empty ocean absolutely terrifies me, all the more because it's such a looming reality, and I feel completely helpless to do anything about it. What is it like, to stand in only black water and mud? To lose the coral reefs I visited, where I felt like I was flying, like I could close my eyes and go to sleep? To lose the history of whalesong? Will I sink to the ocean deep, then, and hope that somewhere down there, in the dark and the cold, something still survives, and bides its time?

_{Wow, that got depressing fast. Sorry.}

Photoshop CS5. Detail shot: