CHOICES

What to leave in and what to take out??? The 'painting' above shows just the lower third of an original oil sketch. There are a couple more crops below, showing more of the painting, especially the interaction of the dark and light shapes. The original painting is posted last.

My inspiration to paint this was the wonderful contrast of dark and light shapes - see photo. However, the final small painting really captured the movement of the feet and became my favorite part of the picture.

Will just that 'feet' portion of the picture be enough to create a good painting as shown in the top cropped painting? I'm not sure.

The full figure - to the left and cropped somewhat - helps establish a pleasing cruciform pattern of darks.

Another possibility is adding the variety of all the curved lines of the bike wheels and cropping the figure even more, as shown next.

Maybe the figure looks too chopped off in this crop - or is it the lack of dominance of lights or darks? They seem to be almost equal here - not so good.

The challenge is to develop a good composition that will draw attention by the value pattern. Plans are to use fluid acrylics on YUPO for the final painting, maybe even throwing some collage in..... We'll see. All comments, suggestions and direction will be much appreciated.




"AMSTERDAM" Oil on Canvas 8 x 12"

CALL IT A DAY WITH YUPO

Here I go again. Same picture but I think a much better composition than the demo I did last Friday night - see January 12th post.

The large dark cruciform design shown here goes off the page on all four sides and is connected. I like this painting the best of all five that I've done. I'll send it to Myrna Wacknov as Week 3 for her challenge.

I'd drawn 'TEXTURE' (YEAH!!!) as the dominant element of design to use plus the 'cruciform' design (easiest one for me to do,) so painting this after designing it was very freeing.

It was done quickly with no fussing or fiddling, mostly relying on instinct and intuition. And it's on YUPO, too. That made it seem even more spontaneous and fun to do.

Colors I used = Burnt Tiger's Eye, in every color to unify the painting, as well as Ultramarine Turquoise, Cobalt Teal Blue, Quinacridone Violet, Quin Magenta, Transparent Pyrrol Orange, Raw Sienna, Perylene Green, and Indanthrone Blue, all from 'Daniel Smith/Seattle, WA' Watercolors.

"CALL IT A DAY" Transparent Watercolor on YUPO 11 x 15"