The biggest challenge was the water. This is a horizontal plane and to make it look horizontal, I needed to adjust the value from darker to lighter as I painted from foreground to background. The change of value needed to be about 15 percent. Too much of a change would make it look like it is an inclined plane, and too little would make it look like a vertical plane.
At the same time, I wanted the temperature to be warmer in the background–which seems contrary, because warm colors tend to be perceived closer to the viewer, with cooler colors in the distance. I will talk about that in the next step.