The first concept I wanted to explore was the natural habitat of these migrants; the wetlands.
I did not want to paint blades of reed grass, nor did I want to do reflections on water. Especially the water, I thought it was passe and run of the mill. Besides, it did not fit well with the soaring birds.
I decided on doing a bunch of nondescript vertical strokes as the vegetations in the wetlands. I tried to avoid packing the strokes too tightly together. I made sure that I had voids amongst my strokes for "breathing". Alum solution was used to paint the initial few strokes. This worked as a resist and altered the absorbency of the Xuan. Subsequent overlays of colored strokes would reveal voids occupied by the initial alum brush strokes.
I also used a rather stiff horse hair brush to facilitate the texture. I kept the color light and not saturated to contrast with the dark birds. I wanted to really separate the geese from the background to give the illusion that they really are airborne.
What ended up was a painting with a horizon dividing the Xuan into 2 equal parts. I suppose my replay of the wetland horizon was so overwhelming that I committed the cardinal sin of halving my Xuan.
My color scheme for the ground reference was on the light side, so the halving was not real obvious. Unfortunately once I noticed it I could not take my eyes off of that. Reminded me of the time a lady sat across from me on the subway with a big boil on her exposed neckline. I knew I shouldn't be staring. Yet the harder I tried to not look at it, the more I ended up looking at it.
So how could I remedy this?
It was suggested maybe I could paint a tree to breakup the horizon. I didn't like it because it took away the sense of free flight. Somehow the geese seemed to be tethered to the tree.
Another suggestion would be to perhaps add other points of focus/interest to breakup the symmetry. In this case, bright colored dots sprinkled strategically on the ground reference could divert ones attention to the dividing line in the middle. This is the same theory behind the application of "moss" dots commonly employed in the floral or landscape genres.
.JPG)
I tried to accentuate certain parts of the grassy foreground to add layers to the composition, and to allow the sloped contour of these layers to dilute the effects of the bisecting horizon.
(The correction is still wet, thus effects are exaggerated)
(Same painting after correction, when dried)
Of course the simplest way to deal with this problem is to crop the painting such that the horizon no longer occupies the mid-line.
