Waiting for Rain

[Janto]

Think I may have spent a bit too long fiddling with this piece in the later stages and not enough composing it at the early stage. First finished painting in years, mostly looking for composition feedback. The piece is done, done, done, but I'll take any suggestions on board and may do another version, possibly digitally.

"Waiting for Rain" acrylic on canvas panel, 12" x 16".

(Colours look washed out to me, looked ok in work on a pro CRT screen, so maybe it's the laptop. Anyone reckon it could do with darkening + a bit more saturation, let me know and I'll tweak it.)

[Slash]

right now the bigass black cloud in the corner is weighing the composition down on that side. Its kind of countered by the details on the right, but still its a little top left heavy. the piece also lacks a strong focal point.

[Janto]

I know what you mean, there's a lot of lines to direct the eye, but most of them just lead to more lines, so overall the piece seems a bit flat & cluttered to me. Thanks for the feedback.

[YVerloc]

I know it's done, but I thought I'd offer a couple of suggestions.

a) Research your colors. If you've got a mood you're going for but you can't nail the light and color from your head, go look for something similar, and use it as a starting point. The internet is a great tool for finding reference to start wiht, and the computer is a great tool for testing, calculating and altering color relationships.

b) The foreground and mid-ground a smunched together. I took the extreme step of turning the FG basically into a silhouette to pull it away from the MG and give the scene a focus.

c) Overlap your forms. This is standard compositional tool. Your storm cloud is hiding from the hill - let them overlap. Not only will it increase the depth of the picture, but it will allow you to get more dramatic contrast out of those towers.

d) a neat atmospheric effect happens underneath rain clouds. The extra moisture in the air under the cloud causes light passing through it to scatter orange, like at sunset. You can see this in one of the reference pics I've attached below.

Here's a super quick 20 minute paintover illustrating the stuff I mention above. Also posted is the reference images I used as inspiration for the color scheme

Cheers

http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/2069/jantooverpaint05zc8.jpg


http://img57.imageshack.us/img57/5433/jantoreferencecy6.jpg

[Janto]

Very interesting, and helpfull. Thanks for that, this piece is done, but (as I look at it more and more) it's more of a sketch than a fully thought out piece, so i'll take these points on board, and put them into my next piece, which has the advantage of having a running figure as its central focus.