Although this piece is about how the eye travels through a painting, my chin was on the ground. The beach surf wasn’t especially dramatic on this day. Gentle, regular low surf broke on the sand. The seaweed laced the edges between land and sea.
I stuck my chin on the sand. This forced intimacy in my perspective. The seaweed became the visual point of entry to this page. The sketch produced was no more than a colorful doodle of swirling notes to fill in later.
Later came and I had to face the fill-in time. The backup photograph, also from chin-sand perspective, was a blue-gray overall color. The snapshot camera color does not pick up all the colors the eye receives. That’s the reason that artists do not enslave themselves to the tyranny of the camera. 
Interpreting color is what artists like myself do.
And that seaweed is orange. It is vibrant, singing orange color with reds for shadows. Pinks play upon the oranges. The variety of Blues push more orange to your eye than is in the pigment. Artists invent the colors that express the chi or life of a colored item.
The strokes I used were open and fast.
Contrast this beach scene with the top piece. This one is also a daytime piece but has an entirely different mood. No seaweed is evident although the slight pink in the foreground means there is seaweed just below the waters. The textures are smoother overall than the Orange Seaweed top piece. This beach scene is more monochrome. Only the blues and grays seem to float the page. Visually, it seems more related to the Orange Seaweed’s backup photograph than the Orange Seaweed piece.
This artist is the conduit of color. Each moment on a pastel sheet is a moment of the eternal. That eternal moment is captured by color and composition.
That moment of the eternal is why I paint.