Last week, I discussed two important aspects of the color-comp stage.  This week, I will discuss a third aspect of the color comp stage as well as how you can use light, color and detail to complement a composition.

The comp stage is the perfect stage at which to make any significant drawing or compositional changes.  This is a third aspect of the color comp and the one that I will be elaborating on today. 

While painting the comp, I identified the problems that I knew I would face during the rest of the process.  I listed all of these issues last week in part 2 of my tutorial and I explained why they seemed problematic. 

Just for clarity, I will briefly list these problems once again:

1. •I knew that I would face a challenge in balancing the blue colors in Bea’s Dress and in the flag with the pink hue that covers the whole piece.
   

2. •There were at least two compositional tangents in the piece: where the smoke met the top of the left tree and where the back of the cannon met Alan’s left shoulder.
   

3. •Alan’s left forearm was almost parallel to the picture plane and thus posed a challenge to keep it from looking too flat or awkward.
   

4. •The shape of the smoke was not fluid enough in the drawing and therefore would need to be re-shaped in order to make the composition flow a little better.
   

I explained the issue with the blues in great detail last week.  As I said, it was mostly resolved by the time I completed the color comp, so I won’t go on any more about that.  However, the tangent issues presented some interesting challenges, so I will start with those today. 

 

One effect that compositional tangents have on an overall composition is that they create unnecessary tension or competition between shapes. Tangents distract the viewer of the painting from the intended focus of the painting.

This is especially problematic when the tangent exists in an area that is secondary or tertiary in importance to the main area of focus.  This is certainly the case with this painting.

Obviously, I want the viewers to be focusing their attention on the the two characters in the painting.

However, the tree top and the smoke cloud are up in the top-right corner of the piece picking a fight and causing a disturbance.  That area of the painting should be saying ‘don’t look over here, look at the main characters!’ but it wasn’t saying that.  The tree was saying ‘Come on, Smoke Cloud, back up off me!’ and the smoke cloud was saying ‘Get outta here, Tree, you’re all huge and green and pointy and you’re cramping my soft pink style...’  It was distracting.

The issue was not evident in the sketch.  It was not until the trees were painted that they began to seem too cumbersome.  I tried re-drawing the tree, making it shorter, but then it just seemed like it was trying to get out of the way of the smoke.  It looked awkward.  It looked too contrived. 

I tried taking it out entirely, but there is not very much room in the overall composition to show many background elements.  That giant cloud of smoke covers most of the background.  The tree had to stay so the characters didn’t look like they were sitting in an empty wasteland.

I tried putting washes of the sky color over the tree in an attempt to push it back atmospherically.  This did not work because the size of the tree and the placement of the other trees indicate that it is fairly close to the main characters.  It is true that when objects are far away, they tend to take on the color of the atmosphere, however, the tree was not far enough away to justify many atmospheric washes.

Later, I also blurred the trees with the Gaussian Blur Filter in Photoshop in order to push the trees back into the distance.  I did not want to blur them too much, since, as established, they are not too far off in the distance.

Note that I did not make this change in the comp stage.  It was not until I began painting the actual background that I re-drew the trees and painted them in this way.  It was a gamble, not firmly establishing my solution before moving into the final painting, but I was getting restless and I think it was successful enough. 

I’m always trying to maintain a balance between the rules and my own personality when painting.  I had to move on before I fell out of love with the piece.  Its sort of risk-versus-reward in this case.

The same kinds of things can be said for the cannon/ shoulder tangent.  In the drawing, the back of the cannon appeared to touch Alan’s left shoulder, which was not physically possible, seeing as how the cannon is maybe fifty feet behind the characters. 

The cannon was unique in that it sat right inside of the cloud of smoke.  Because of this, I had more liberty to screen it back with multiple washes of the smoke color.  I hoped that I could solve the tangent problem in that way, without repositioning the cannon, but it simply didn’t work.  I didn’t make this decision, however, until well into the final painting. 

The eventual repositioning of the cannon worked very well.  It really harmonized with the rest of the painting.

I was attempting to get the shape of the smoke to optimally effect the overall composition.  I wanted the shape of the smoke to draw the viewer’s eye through the piece, to influence the viewer to rest their eyes on the main characters but also to maintain the qualities of smoke: random and puffy.

Granted, I was not attempting to paint realistic smoke.  I was attempting to paint a very stylized, soft, romantic version of smoke.  I tried to make the smoke look more like big soft clouds than like real cannon smoke, but since we are talking solely about composition at this point, I will save those more technical choices for a later post.

Things got especially crowded around the area near Alan’s right hand.  The outline of the smoke, the strap from the gun, Alan’s arm, all of these objects were intersecting and it took a number of tries to get it right.  Again, I was trying to keep the shape of the smoke looking random but I wanted it to complement what was happening in the middle-ground.  I am pretty pleased with the end result.

Here is where I will transition from talking about the compositional issues to how I used light, color and detail (or lack thereof) to complement the composition.

As a quick side-note let me say that achieving a focus on the characters in this piece isn’t too difficult because the characters are right in the center of the composition.  The real challenge with this piece, compositionally, is achieving a dynamic sensibility despite the centrally-located characters. 

The finished piece could have easily felt static and boring with the characters at the dead-center.  There are a few compositional elements that help keep things interesting (the strong diagonal of the flag, the smoke, the angle of Bea’s body etc...) but any potential compositional interest could have been squandered if the painting had not been approached with regard to said potential.

Note how there is a gradient of light running from the top of the cloud to the bottom.  In other words, the smoke is brighter and more saturated with the pink light near the top and it is grayer near the ground.

This helps to emphasize the strong diagonal of the smoke shape.  The brighter area at the top of the smoke catches the viewer’s eye if they happen to be looking at that part of the painting.  The contrast between the dark blue of the flag and the bright area of the smoke pulls the eye directionally toward... ...where?  You’re RIGHT!  The CHARACTERS!

The flag, of course serves the same function that the smoke does, compositionally.  It serves a much grander narrative purpose, but its compositional purpose could not be more obvious.  It creates a direct line from the brightest spot in the smoke to the top of Alan’s hat.

The trees in the background echo the same diagonal direction.  However, with this strong diagonal, how come the viewer’s eyes don’t overshoot the characters and fly off the picture plane altogether?  Contrast.  The dark brown of Alan’s hat, the relatively dark (and very saturated) brown of Bea’s hair set against the lighter cloud of smoke create a strong contrast and a visual anchor point that keeps the viewer’s attention. 

Furthermore, the characters have a certain inherent gravity that attracts a viewer’s attention.  This attention exists by virtue of the fact that they are people.  People (real people - viewers) are drawn to people (real or fictional) and this phenomenon, along with the aforementioned compositional location of the main characters combine to create a visual resting place for the viewer.

But we don’t want the resting place to become a visual stop.  Any good composition is fluid.  It keeps the eye moving around the piece with all of the compositional elements existing in harmony.  However, we don’t want an illustration to be completely caustic and lack any sort of visual anchor.

Applying this knowledge, I didn’t want the viewer’s eyes to stop on the characters.  That is why the smoke-diagonal continues and the cannon takes over the role of the flag, reinforcing this strong direction.  At this point, however, we arrive at the border of the picture plane.  We need something to bring the viewer’s eye back into the piece.

This is where the two bushes and the placement of Bea’s legs take over.  They send the viewer’s eyes down and over to the rocks in the foreground which are angled to point simultaneously back to Alan’s face and also back to the highest point of contrast (where the darkest blue of the flag overlaps the brightest spot in the smoke).

The smoke, the cannon, the trees and the other background elements are blurred so that they sit back in the distance, creating a separation between background and middle-ground.  The details in the foreground don’t overwhelm the middle-ground because the foreground consists of very similar colors.  Even though the colors in the foreground plant are very sharp and very dark, the cast shadow from the rocks helps to diminish the visual weight of the plant by reducing the contrast of the plant and the grass behind it.

The very bright highlights in Alan’s gun pull the viewer’s eyes back up into the place that all of this originated.  They don’t overwhelm the characters either because those highlights, although they are very bright, are also very small.

It is not so apparent in the reduction above, but the grass is more clearly rendered, the closer it is to the viewer.  The grass consists more of loose brush strokes, patches of color as it recedes into the background.

The trees are very loosely painted as well.  Smoke is inherently blurry and undefined.  This contrast of detail helps to diminish the background elements and emphasize the characters, which are very sharply rendered.  In fact, I actually cheated (call it ‘artistic license’) in painting the foreground elements. 

I put more detail and brighter highlights into the characters than I put into the rocks and plants in the foreground.  This also helps to direct the viewer’s attention to the right place. 

The cannon is slightly blurred and it was painted-over multiple times with the same colors used in the smoke to help push it back into the background, but I put some highlights and a bit more detail into it so that it would appear a little closer than  the other background elements.

There is quite a bit more that I could say about all of this, but I’m about blogged-out, so I will save the topics of gathering good reference and making the transition from comp to final until next week.

:: continued in part four ::