I think this is my favorite of the lot of them... mostly because of the 'atmospheric' perspective you have using the water. Super cool!

Thanks hon!

You got the river water perfectly!

Thank you very much! This picture made me want to experiment with illustrating water interacting with light more...

The brilliant bars and spots of refracted sunlight on underwater objects are the most challenging of all because their intensity can be far greater than full sunlight itself which makes them mighty hard to depict.

Yes indeed! This is one area where I believe digital art will far excel traditional media (especially for myself): in digital art it is very easy to adjust the contrast of an image, and even the colors themselves, to achieve the look of underwater effects. In traditional painting you can only use so much white and black...

Very true! Some of the psycho-visual tricks used in displaying HDR photographs may be useful, too. For example, enhancing fine texture details in bright areas makes those areas look brighter because your eyes can see more detail in bright light than in dim light. Oversharpening bright areas selectively using Photoshop's Filter, Sharpen, Unsharp Mask, to provide a trace of bright halos around the brightest details can also make them seem brighter, because you see similar halos around overly bright lights.

wonderful work

Thank you very much!