This week Hunky Gary went from this:
… to this.
There are two reasons this looks odd:
- The shirt and the face are still black and white.
- The elbow on the left makes a junction of three intersecting lines.
- Not enough contrast above the shoulders and too much by the tree.
- I have no idea how to work with color.
I can fix some of it.
8 responses to “Weekly Paint Progress: 8/17”
Can you lengthen the grass on the path by the left elbow to break up that line?
(still: it’s looking good, and that shrub over his shoulder now blends in with the background rather than looking like a large but unfortunate-in-life bleached tribble sneaking around his neck onto his shoulder, so: progress!)(I figured it would become something, but I was amused at its prior stages.)
(it’s looking *really* good, is what I’m saying, by not saying anything aside from an idea to break up the lines. Yes, his face needs color [his shirt could just be grey, that would be fine], but otherwise: WOW)
KC – the annoying thing it was right before. Then I got all scribbly and it’s wrong. No worries, I can make it right again. It;s not a watercolor you can never fix.
KC – also the composition is dreadful. A Z? A big white and tan z slashing through it, from tree to arms to road?
So, next time you work from a photograph, you can photoshop the background into some more pleasing compositional harmony beforehand. 🙂 But not everything has to have amazing composition; it’ll be fine. (and STILL I am amazed that you got a human, not deep in the uncanny valley, *who even looks like Gary* with oil paints *and* having had to fix the shoulders *and* with foreshortened arms and such.)
KC – Oh I can still fix the composition. And I don’t want to rely on Photoshop for the background – I want it loose, even if thats a mistake.
Oh, I was suggesting photoshopping in a differently-composed background if a photograph was good person-composition but added up badly with the background, not going tight with the resultant painting, just: that path is wrong in the photograph composition, we’ll photoshop him in a park/shrubbery/differently-placed-path/series-of-muppets/whatever to make a new “photograph” as the base concept for the painting.
(also: that is very cool, that you can still fix the composition!!! Does that involve painting over the background and trying really hard to not overwork his edges, or something else?)
KC – I think it will be easy, I’ll just do something so the arms and the tree and the road are different enough that they don;t make a z and then also do something to carry the eye down to the bottom left.
KC – and when I compare it to the previous week it needs an exit point at the top left too. There was one before.