It took me forever to paint the kelp honestly this is as good as it's gonna get. next is adding lighting and shadows. maybe add some fish.

After messing around with color gradients, I finalized my sketch (the bottom one). I really like the composition and want the manta ray to look big compared to the person.

Now I am working on the composition. At this point, I was going to pick the top left as my final sketch but I ended up liking the other two more, however, I couldn't decide which one.

Here are some notes and thumbnails I've done to brainstorm. I thought it would've been too generic to do a big tree so I went for an ocean theme which I've never done before but I'm happy to learn something new!