Allright, so I've been tinkering around with my canyon scene and using some tips and tricks from Nazgul's waterfall tutorial, I have come up with the following...
For starters, let's bring back an older picture simply for the sake of comparison. This is what it looked like last time you saw it...
Since then, I have slowly been working my way up the canyon with scenery and adding layer upon layer (to create depth) of WS's realistic water.
One day, while waiting for my son to get out of school, I looked down and found this beautiful picture sitting at the top of the heap in the trash can (I'm sorry Brian, photographer is unknown). This picture became my inspiration...
Since my lazy little creek now looked like a placid little fake stream, I came back with WS water effects and added some texture. On top of the texture, I hit the highlights with white to create turbulence. It's a little too turbulent for what I was going for but I'm fairly pleased with the results for never having tackled something of this type before. For the trio of falls, I sort of borrowed the idea from Nazgul to apply WS's water effects onto a flat sheet of wax paper, streak it with a toothpick and then let it dry. BAD IDEA (Nazgul said to use a baking sheet and I should have listened!). I would not have thought so, but it stuck too much to the wax paper and did not retain its transparency. Sooo, I tried again. This time with aluminum foil... which worked. Once dry, I peeled it off the alum. foil and coated the backside with a LIGHT blue highlighter. This time, I painted the rocks behind the falls with white highlights, measured and cut the falls to fit and stuck them in place. I still want to add a lot more greenery to imitate the picture and I just found some Aspens in the latest catalogue that I'd like to order, but here's some in between shots of where I'm at now...