Friday, April 27, 2012

Shadow Play


Acrylic on 9x12 canvas sheet
Available through DPW gallery/auction

This was done for this weeks DPW challenge called "The Cropping challenge". Rita Kirkman, this weeks host, posted the photo and asked all to simplify things. Do different crops, change things, and do multiple paintings if possible. The idea was to practice composition with a busy scene. 

Usually I am known to zoom in tight on an image & crop it as a close up. But this scene "spoke" differently to me - so I opted for the triangle approach. I kept the wide angle view, eliminated the car and focused on 3 main subjects (that formed the triangle). The yellow house in the background center, the porch with hanging flowers on the right, the smaller statue & floral pot in the foreground on the left. By hope was to bring the viewers eye up the driveway, moving left to right to center. And introducing enough variation to give the eye different things to see - to attempt to hold the viewers interest. Did this succeed?

I almost scrapped this painting twice! But in the end, I like how this turned out. I struggled with the trees, of all things. I usually find trees easy enough to do, but I worked & reworked the darks & lights. One of the things about this photograph that I liked was the dappled shadows on the driveway - which I played up on the background house as well as on the foreground grass. I thought adding more shadow on the left would help to balance the image with the larger, heavier house on the right.

2 comments:

martinealison said...

Une très jolie composition... j'aime la lumière qui parcimonieusement illumine votre peinture.
gros bisous

Autumn Leaves said...

You've succeeded in spade, Nan. This is gorgeous and also makes me think of simpler times.

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