Epilogue to Yellow Mountain

I looked at my finished Yellow Mountain painting and I felt something was amiss.  I did not get the fulfillment I was expecting.  It took me a little while to put a finger on what was happening.

I did not create enough separation between the mountain features to effuse the grandeur and vastness of this landscape.

Upon re-examination of my work, the impression was that this was a bird's-eye view of a mountain range.  I could have and should have widened the perspective of the features.  I should have utilized my 18 mm lens and picked a different vantage point to capture the true ambience.  Obviously this was not photography and it was too late to do anything.

Or was it?

To prove my theory, I begged the help of technology, Photoshop.

I digitally separated my painting into 3 distinct areas.  The foreground on the left, middle-ground would be the 4 peaks of the mountain and the trailing features painted with splash ink brushstroke would be the background.   Cloud and mist features would be an effective means for the separation.  They are voids that would not appear as omissions.

Immediately I felt the painting opened up and now inviting me to be immersed as a participant.

Since I could not push back the features in what should have been my middle-ground, I experimented with another trick.  I wanted to add some incidentals in front of the 4 peaks, thus effectively adding distance.

So birds were deployed.

I had to change the birds from black to white in front of the peaks to make them more conspicuous.  Call that creative freedom if one must.

Did this help the painting?