Friday, March 11, 2011

What's Wrong With This Picture?


In writing, a story without character development is called slight. In painting, a painting with only one place for the eye to travel is slight. In this painting the bridge and the interesting sky are on the same picture plane and the foreground is underused. I rushed into painting the feeling of the rainy afternoon with the fading  warm pink glow of the setting sun before I solved all of the design problems. This picture can be saved!
How can I strengthen the design?
 I want to entice the viewer's eye to the foreground with an interesting shape or shapes. I harmonize my paintings  through repeating shapes and colors. I  repeated the triangular shapes of the bridge's trusses in  the large triangular shape of the road and the smaller elongated triangular shape of the  sidewalk.  The irregular cubed shaped buildings repeat the outside shape of the bridge  How can I can add more triangular shapes? It would also help to add some X's. What  is interesting,  triangular that I can put in the foreground to move the viewer's eye around my picture world? The simple solution is to add the reflection of the bridge.
Now I will see if I can make this painting beautiful.


In the final version, I added the reflection. I also darkened the lower corners both to give the illusion of depth and to keep the eye from moving into the corner. I also lightened the background trees to add depth.

1 comment:

  1. This is awesome! The explanation is really cool!

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