Seeing as a Painter - Part 2
The Artistic Decision Process
Equally
important as any mastery of software or paint mixing and application is
the ability to make good artistic decisions. This, more than anything
else, will make or break you as an artist.
In the following essay, I want to explore this concept with you and show
you my thought process on how I conceived and developed this piece of
artwork of the three dancers.
Finding The Painting Within The Photo
My starting point for this project was a scene of some Folk Dancers waiting to go on stage at a Cinco De Mayo festival. What initially caught my interest were the intricate ruffles in the white lace dresses, and colorful flowers in the girls hair as well as the natural grouping and movements of the subjects. It also seemed to resonate some emotional feeling of anticipation.
Immediately though, I could see some problems with this as the stating point. To start with, there seemed to be two separate groupings here the conflicted with each other. It was difficult to determine what was the center of focus. The wall created a sharp dividing line of two very contrasting colors and tonal values that seemed to bisect the image.
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| I decided to separate the photo and concentrate on the group on the left that seemed to capture more expression and form. I still had the problem of the wall to deal with. | My solution here was to work the upper background down using a cloning brush, and then play around with the color, hue, contrast, and brightness until I came up with this as a new starting point. After study this composition for awhile I still wasn’t satisfied. It seemed to still lack a main focal point and the flow of the image just did not seem to work right as a vertical. |
By cropping it more tightly and changing the format from a vertical to horizontal, it now seemed to have a better flow and composition to it.
Abstracting the Image – Starting to Build the Painting
My next step was to take the image through a series of transformation that would start to give me the look that I wanted to capture and varying degrees of detail and abstraction. It is not my intention at this point to go into the specific techniques or setting that I used here. These are covered in much more depth in my Master Class Tutorials. What I want you to see here is how to start seeing the image more as a painting than photo.
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| In this rendition I wanted to capture more details in the dress and face. | In this rendition my goal was to get an over all abstracted look without focusing on the details. Notice the difference in the texture of the dress and roughness in the background. |
Combining and Refining
By combining parts of both images I obtained a synthesis of detail and abstraction. I also decided to darken the background to give more weight to the characters. I want to emphasize here that I have now totally left the world of photography and am now working with a Painting, in the same manner that any painter would, only with a different set of tools. This is now where I get into a much more refined process to try to bring out the look and feel of oil paint on canvas.
Working
within Corel Painter, I’ve made many refinements from the last image. To
start with I’ve smoothed out and gave a more brush look to the face arms
and flowers. I’ve increased the saturation and warmed up the face color
to give the subjects richer and warmer color. I’ve also refined the
textures of the dresses to give it more of a brushed and varied look.
I’ve also smoothed the background from the rough look into one with more
dimpled undertones of color and texture rather than the previous rough
look. Finally I’ve darkened the back figure to give it more of sense of
distance and separation from the figure on the left, and left many of
the facial details more abstract and vague.
While I liked this rendition, it still did not seem quite right. The overall flow of the picture seemed to take the viewer off to the left and away from the picture.
My
solution was to reverse the figure on the left so she was now facing
inward instead of out. This changed the flow of the artwork from going
out of the picture to bringing the viewer in to the center.
The object of this lesson was to hopefully give you some insight into
how and why artistic decisions are made and how painting is as much
about the decision process as it is about the medium you work in.
I will be continuing on this track of exploring Seeing as a Painter
in forth coming essays