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"

Adding Human Interest

It has been two years since I finished my Shadows painting (Chronicle Of Shadows) and it is still pinned on the drywall in my studio.  I normally would either mount my paintings or just throw them in a pile as my etudes.  In that particular blog I used the term epilogue, thinking that I had written the last chapter on this work and I would close the book.

Little did I know.

After two years of casting occasional glances, ruminating on the vibes of the painting, I am convinced that the painting needs dressing up.  My playing with light values and casting shadows was fun, a lot of fun.  Now it feels almost anti-climatic.

Isn't it time to smoke a cigarette?  Wink! Wink!  Ah but I've severed my friendship with tobacco!

I need to add some human interest to this painting.  I am thinking of adding a jogger, a couple, someone, on the path.

I must confess that I had entertained this thought from the very beginning.  I have this one artist who eschews cliche and would chide me for being "redundant" as I recall.  Having people on the pathway is so mundane.  Is it?  How does one decide what is vapid and what is "just right"?

It must have been a broadcast on public educational channels that showed neuroscientists employing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to study how our brain deals with art.  Aside from a neuroaesthetic response, there seems to be a neuromotor response also.  Thus an image of a runner elicits a response from the area of the brain that controls our legs, though no physical movements from our own legs ensued.   We literally immerse ourselves in the picture.  Being a pharmacist with some biomedical knowledge, this topic intrigues me.  It would be interesting to study the different kinds of responses when we are subjected to various genres of subject matters.  Does ethnicity, culture and social economics have a say to which areas of the cortex is activated?  Why do some of my friends find a visit to the Grand Teton boring and others jubilating.  How is our preference of one thing over something else arrived at?  Does it have anything to do with dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is associated with pleasure; or oxytocin, the chemical that causes uterine muscle to contract amongst other things, and bonding.  So if we avoid something, is it due to an inhibition in these pathways?  I'm way off the subject now.

I suppose I should not be taking a reductionist point of view.  There are things that cannot be defined by a formula;  how and what we paint is one of them.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  Now this is definitely cliche!

I decided to include a girl walking her dog in my Shadows painting.  Putting a person in the painting is what I call adding human interest, literally.   I now need to find out where's the best location to insert them.  I summoned the help of my clear vinyl sheet.

With that I have freedom in moving the subjects around to find an optimum size and location.  I started out by painting the girl and her dog on this clear sheet and placed it over my painting.

I added a different sized silhouette to gauge the fit.

Then I moved my clear sheet to a different location to decide

I finally decided to put them at the bend next to the edge of the path.  I particularly enjoyed how the dog's tail was serendipitously pointing towards the out swung hand of the girl.  A connection was made.  Whether the dog was leashed or not would remain an enigma.  To define that further would be trite.

In the end I assuaged my indecision whether to add the pedestrian by going off on a tangent with some logical excuses perhaps, but mostly by just painting it.  Perhaps the Shadows painting has lost its initial appeal and I can afford to take no prisoners the second time around?