Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Lena Painting Stage 2


Lena's right hand in the photo was too "posed" (all fingers perfectly aligned). I decided to change the hand and ended up looking at my own hand in a mirror and redrawing Lena's hand. Ultimately, I made only a few changes which, to my thinking, improved the look. I learned that small changes can make a big difference in my judgement. The tree gave me (is giving me) lots of trouble. I started putting in a lot of detail to attempt to capture the texture of the bark. At some point I decided that there was too much detail and smudged out (and erased) a lot of the work. When in doubt simplify. I am also learning that it is important to carefully study objects before attempting to paint them. When I get going, I begin to make up the texture. Unless I really know the object from study, I cannot capture the texture or essence of the object. Slowly, I added some of the detail back. The tree is still bugging me. I just read a quote from Sally Strand, "The lights carry the color, but the darks carry the painting." Now I'm concerned about the darks (trees left and right) and how they will or will not support Lena. My fear is that the dark trees with their detail will steal attention away from Lena. We'll see. Back to work.

1 comment:

  1. Hey Larry looks like we are both back to work! I like Lena's expression. The shape of the tree doesn't bother me - or distract my eye too much - just the color. It look really greenish yellow on the computer.I think Lena's bright blue shirt will balance out the tree. Maybe if you use a softer color for the tree you could still do a lot of detail. don't know cause all I can see is what is there now. Are your grandchildren as sweet as they look? do you always work from photographs - if so is that harder?

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