There's no shadow under her, I know. The little stinker's given me quite a bit of trouble. I can't decide what to do with the background...everything I've tried looks wrong. You can probably see after-images of previous background attempts beneath the gesso. Any ideas? To be honest, I kind of like having her enveloped in the same color...even putting a shadow beneath her looks a little worse than with no shadow at all.
4 comments:
I have no problem with leaving it blank; it doesn't come off as something is missing. Her placement in the picture plane, however, looks off. If she was down towards the lower left corner, it might give her some weight and contextualize the space.
There's something happening with her right hand that makes it looks mangled. Perhaps its the slash of ground peeking through just to the left of it.
Ya, the shadow's the wrong color on her right hand.
I agree that the flat background is fine. I really like the top to bottom gradation. However, I think the figure needs to be further modeled into 3D space, then the contrast would be very appealing.
The biggest issue for me with this is that there seems to be some confusion in how the volume of the figure is rendered in terms of front and back. The forearms with the bright stripes jump forward, good, but the hands are so dark that they fall back, bad. The space below the chin is bright enough to really come forward, but the whole face is left far behind. Also, below the girl's left hand, there is that bright patch on the knee that is jumping forward, further than the hand, and further than the front edge of the book.
If you utilize a little projected lighting and nail the front to back spatial presence it will really pop of the flat background.
I like the background how it is. Personally I would like to see something else going on with the book. To me that grey looks like something you might put down as a ground, especially because there is some dark ground coming through at the top of the painting. When I think of a childrens book, the pages are usually white. I mean I don't think you need to put an elaborate illustration in there or anything but some hint of text or image or even just a solid color would give me a little bit more to look at. Making the book a little more interesting would hold my attention a lot longer because I look at the girl, and then I look where she is looking...but there's nothing really to look at.
Post a Comment