X The Wheel

[Highfive]

Here's another card for the eatpoo tarot deck. The main aim here was to get across a extreme sense of scale and perspective to show that these gears are more like continents rather than islands. Here's the card description:

The Wheel of Fortune: Fate, Fortune, Luck
This card represents the wheel of life/fate's constant turning and the progression of life's ups and downs. No one can escape the action of the wheel and we will alternately find ourselves on top or on the bottom. It teaches the lesson that the only constant thing in life is change. Some cards depict the wheel rooted in a heavenly background, implying that there is a greater, constant, unchanging Truth, while the wheel of personal life and experience turns ever onward.

http://www.high5art.com/images/Xthewheel_new.jpg

C+C appreciated :)

[cycrincy]

thats a coolpic where u come up with it

[Elwell]

The concept is really strong, and it's well painted. I have some compositional issues, though. It seems overweighted to the left, and the perspective of the foreground buildings seems off (I understand what you were trying to do with that extreme aerial vewpoint, but it's not quite working to my eye).

So much of the right side of the picture seems like dead space. If the entire image was rotated clockwise in the frame a little bit I think it would be much stronger. The city in the foreground would get brought closer to the center, simultaniously making it visually more important and lessening the perspective skewing. You would also be able to show more of the smoke from the valcano, which would lead you into the picture, rather than out of it as it does now.

Still and all, this is mostly nitpicking on my part. It's a great piece.

[ChadTHX1138]

Very imaginitive!

[NOOSE]

VERY impresive!

[Highfive]

cycrincy- Thanks! I was just brainstorming about how many ways a wheel or cycling events could be shown, which lead to time, clocks and finally gears. So yeah, this was a new way of presenting gears, with the concept of age cycles worked into it.

Elwell- Hehe, I REALLY appreciate those nitpicks as I was scratching my head for a while on how to deal with the composition for this. There had to be a progression of a city from it's prospering (which has to be in the foreground) to it's destruction, another island in the distance (I was hoping to show a modern city there, suggesting it's about to suffer a similar fate :evilbat: ) and just for contrast a tiny island connecting by the teeth. Placing three greatly different circles in perspective in a portrait frame is not easy.

I like your composition suggestion - it sounds like it would work better, plus the curves of the gears would sweep across the image. It's not like most people on art forums to suggest a complete workaround to a compositional problem, so thanks very much for bringing that up!

ChadTHX1138 and NOOSE Cheers, guys, glad you dig it!