The Rights of the Painting

I painted this as the demo for yesterday's workshop.  I was working from a value sketch I did a couple of week's ago.

In designing the composition, I had to move the buildings on the right.  Where the light shape is at the bottom of the page, there is actually a road.  But the rights of the painting came first.  I was more concerned with the light shape instead of the accurate depiction of the scene. 

Another consideration was connecting the shapes.  The light of the buildings flows uninterrupted into the area below them creating an interesting shape.  The white of the lighthouse also leaks into the white shape.

So don't be a slave to the scene.  Adjust elements so that the rights of the painting come first!

Silhouetting

Sorry that it's been a while getting around to painting this from the last posting. I took a side trip down to Bradenton to visit an old friend of mine.

This week I'm giving a workshop here in the Apalachicola area. This was the first demo I did for the class. I tried to illustrate the concept of granulation. The soft colors of the sky were created by painting wet-into-wet.  The softness of the sky made the dark, hard edged silhouettes of the fishermen cleaning their catch stand out even more dramatically.

  If you study the silhouettes, you"ll see that there is very little detail within the shapes of the figures. If you get the silhouette shapes right, details are not needed to describe the figures.

In the next post, I'll talk about painting the negative areas to define the shapes of the white or light shapes.