Well, last night I returned to my painting and made some pretty heavy revisions. After midnight. That was mistake 1, right?
I both solved a bunch of problems and caused a new one of this huuuuge imbalance in composition. I snapped this photo, asked a few of my IRC and AIM buddies for help. They gave me some helpful advice, and I decided to go forward with some changes and clean up. It was now ebbing up on 5am.
I really should have learned this lesson many times before. Compositional decisions made at 4 or 5 in the morning are not smart. Sometimes they're AMAZING, but they still make no sense, and good luck explaining it during crit when people ask you what you were smoking when you decided to paint your entire canvas lime green. Not that I did that hear, but I did something similarly stupid. I decided to segment up that yellow bar going down the image. Tried to make it look like a staggering of other buildings. I wasn't thinking much about color choice, so that made this and even stupider thing to do. I knew this was probably a dumb thing to do, but I still reached for the brush anyway. I knew I should have just left it for morning, when I was more awake and I could look at it fresh, but nope, I had to fix it...
And sorry, no photo of it. I quickly wiped it away quickly once I realized how bad it looked, only to realize that now, the transparent fleshy yellow is now lime green.
Whoops.
A few more layers of paint and it's back to how it was, kind of. So I wasted about 2 or 3 hours, of time I could have spent sleeping, only to make a problem and get no where pretty damn fast on solving the original issue of balance.
I like the diagonal edge. It adds something to the composition, but didn't fix a damn thing. It needs to not be so wobbly, but that'll get fixed sometime... The red shape in the corner is now bugging me a whole lot too, since I blacked out the peoples.
Bah. I'll just do drawings today, maybe start another piece. This thing is in time out till I decide to deal with it. I still have another 2 weeks till the show.
As always, any suggestions, criticisms, comments, or words of encouragement are welcome.
I feel like you need to do something with that red shape you made mention of. In the top picture I got a sense of movement, following the people in the forefront toward (what I'm imagining is) the theatre in the back (speaking of which, I really like the people in silhouette like this; very striking!). But if you're starting the movement in the bottom right hand corner, it needs to continue throughout--right now we're coming in to the middle and getting stuck where that red shape meets the theatre. And the red shape is just /there/. I think if you give that section some depth, either bring it forward or push it farther back, that'll help you a bit.
ReplyDeleteThose're my thoughts, at least! <3
Hey there,
ReplyDeleteI just found your blog on Gaia and I'm liking it so far. I'm not much of an art critic but I like the use of colours in this piece. It sort of reminds me of the work of the painter in Heroes, if you've ever watched that. If not, then I just sound crazy.
When you have a chance have a look at my blog too please!
Peter