My Bag Of Tricks In Adding Human Interest.

I've been receiving some positive feedback on my Adding Human Interest piece.  For me, knowing that I had dragged this from obscurity into the open, modified it a little and enjoying it all over again was very similar to reconnecting with a long lost friend, or better yet, playing with a toy that had disappeared under the sofa for years and managed to reappear somehow.   I would therefore share the steps I took to accomplish this.

The was the painting that I started with.

I was toying with shadows in this painting.  The shadows were stylized, in the sense that I had exaggerated their proportion and  orientation to the bright area off the middle, at the end of the path.  So instead of the shadows all following one direction, they seem to radiate from a bright spot behind the trees to the left, like the spokes of a wheel.  I did that to draw attention to the virtual intersection of two paths.  A friend had commented that the painting had the feel of a birds-eye view to it.  I suppose the extreme close-up description of the branches on the right helped to create the impression as if the painting was a photo taken with a wide angle lens from above.

Once I had decided that I wanted to incorporate a human figure walking a dog into the scenery, I not only had to decide on the best location for my subjects, but how to play out their shadows to blend in with the overall flavor of the painting.  After I painted in the added ancillaries, I made similar cutout figures on a piece of scrap paper.

I then folded these where their feet meet the ground, and placed them on a white surface and shone a low angled light behind them.  This helped me visualize and learn where the shadows cast.

Now that I was assured of my modeling technique, I placed the cutouts over the subjects I had painted and again shined a low light behind them and painted in their shadows for real.

After all that, I had this:

I just did plein air in my room.

There are those who accuse me of being fastidious.  After all I should have been able to portray shadows and add to the ambiance  without going through all this.  How difficult is it to paint in 2 shadows?

My answer to that is "Perhaps! But I enjoyed rigging all that up!  It's the journey that I enjoyed"