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Art Critique |
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Critique |
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THINGS I REALLY LIKE ABOUT THE PAINTING 1. The positioning of the focal point in this painting is great … The focal point of this painting, the nest, is positioned in the bottom left corner, following the rule of thirds quite nicely. 2. Color schemes are always a huge consideration. In this case, a complimentary color scheme is used very effectively. 3. You have used just enough detail to make the painting interesting, without overdoing it. |
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About the artist … Fran LaPrairie received a bachelors degree in art education from Webster College (now university) in Webster Groves, MO in 1967. She then married, started a family and got a job - life happened! In 2007 she "started all over again" by taking classes from the City of Scottsdale recreation department. In 2008 she "discovered" Joy Skinner and in 2009 took a summer class in watercolor from her. She loves watercolor, pastels, oil, as well as sculpting wood, stone and clay. In reference Fran had a black and white photo of a nest. She also used several tree photos and pieced together the parts of each that she liked. |
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Watercolor Painting by artist |
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AREAS FOR POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENT In offering suggestions for improvement with this painting, I would consider several factors... Tonal Balance throughout the painting — is there sufficient balance of lights, midtones, and darks throughout your painting? Lets separate your painting into two areas, the sky area, and the tree. Using the two main colors, we could do a tonal study to access whether we have a harmonious balance or not. Denman Ross designed a 9-step tonal value chart that is easy for us to use as a tool for ensuring a good balance in our painting. |
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In this particular case, I think that you have lots of highlighted areas and midtone values, but not so many darks. In the computer edited version that follows, you’ll see that I’ve deepened the values of the tree. While doing this I carefully considered which direction the light was coming from and created a shaded side of the tree branches. This provides us with a more shapely, interesting tree. Composition — The overall composition is good, although I do think there are a few things you could do to strengthen it. You could help to lead the viewers eye to the focal point by darkening the blue color so that it kind of swirls and leads the eye to the nest. In your painting, the vertical branch on the right almost seems to divide the blue area of the sky on the right of it from the very light area of the sky on the left. I feel this division places too much importance in the painting on this branch. By introducing more blue/grey color the sky becomes more interesting and we would not see this division. Center of Interest — The center of interest (the nest) is an area that should stand out from the rest. The viewers eyes should be drawn quite naturally to it. There are several things that we can do to ensure this. In this painting, I feel that we can strengthen the area of interest by creating greater contrast. The underside and the inner part of the nest could be more shadowed. This will help to give the illusion of the nest being somewhat 3D instead of appearing flat. Strengthening the blue that surrounds the nest will also provide more contrast which will help to make the nest “pop”. |
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One last suggestion I have would be to work on the birds a little bit. The bird sitting on the nest is a little too “round” in shape. You can use darker colors to shade the underside of him to help fix this. His tail feathers could also have some darks to help shape him better. There should be more detail in the bird sitting on the nest, as this is your center of interest, than the bird flying through the air. I have tried to incorporate the changes I’ve suggested into the computer edited version on the left. You have a lovely painting and I wish you many successes as an artist. I hope you’ve found this critique useful. Happy Painting ! … Joy Skinner joy@joyskinner.com |
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“Art Critique” is a Fees Based Service provided by Joy Skinner Written Critique Computer edited version of your painting emailed to you, 10 minute telephone conversation to answer any
Contact Joy to make arrangements for a critique done of your painting. Email joy@joyskinner.com |
