I hadn’t done any more work on Solitude in this photo, but it does show the piece in its entirety. I stopped working on it because I was growing tired of dramatic colors, lighting and poses, and it was feeling a bit contrived. Luckily I had another piece to work on, a straight forward head and shoulders portrait with subtle lighting coming from multiple directions and a simple background. Despite its simplicity (or perhaps because of its simplicity), this other portrait has become one of my favorites so far. I won’t be posting it for a couple of weeks though; sorry for the teaser!
Back to Solitude… since I took the photo above, I have made changes to the background as a whole, as well as to the shirt, hands, and the bench. As I mentioned before, I drew the trees mostly out of my imagination, as the reference photo showed a lot of vines and shrubs with some leaves remaining. By the time I went back to this piece, the trees I had drawn looked very similar to those outside – bare and gray! The curved stone bench is pretty much like the one I was sitting on.
Tomorrow I am bringing this and the other portrait I mentioned to a photography studio to have them scanned. This will be the first time I’ve tried scanning, so I will write about how it goes later on this week.
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5 comments:
I see you and Solitude made friends again. Thanks for showing the entire piece. Hope you two can get along until you're finished:)
Hope you show your updates soon.
This is such a strong dramatic piece, I can imagine you have to be in the right kind of mood to work on it. Hang in there it's looking good so far.
Thanks for the encouragement, Marsha and Sheona!
Wow, what a difference seeing the entire piece Holly! I like it more. I had problems with the cropping when you were showing the partials before, and had no idea it was larger than what you were showing. It's stronger and very interesting. The two images, however, are very different (the scan and this photo). Which is closer to the original?
Thank you, Debbi. The photo was somewhat accurate at the time I took it, though it came out with a little too yellowish. However, I ended up going over the entire background with paint thinner and this gave the piece a darker greyish color. The scan is very much like the original.
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