Something waaaay different today but something i wanted to do for quite some time now.
A prologueyyyy rant beforehand to explain what this is all about:
Most of my current and past professional work is/was very character centered, I've been doing a lot of cardwork, bookcovers and stuff like that. basically all these are about (not so much the bookcovers than the cardwork) is to take a character and make it the only subject of the painting which inevitably results in just filling the entire picture with the character and him/her taking up all of the canvas space. While this is all great and I love doing this work AND basically all of the work that I've been doing the last half year or so was tailored to fit in this market, I've noticed that this kind of imagery got stuck so hard in my brain that soon this was the only thing i was doing and whenever I would start a more landscape focused piece I totally failed because my subconcious always wanted to make that focal point of the image a HUGE part of the canvas.
So okay this sounds so incredibly obvious but I swear this never came to me, for some reason im my head there were only these categories of "character focused =huge character" and "environment focused =tiny/no character".
So for some reason I got the thought "hmmm what I've I tried to make a strong character piece that's all about the character but just make him relatively small on the canvas, could that work?"
Then I went on and checked some artists that I really really love, picked out some character focused art (not necessarily focused in a way that you totally know the character but in a way that shows that the character/person is clearly the focal point of the picture).
I did those ugly looking studies here and my mind was just blown away hahah :D
It's incredible just HOW small the characters are in some of those and how large they actually look (or more correctly how they do not strike one as being a small thing on the canvas). Even the characters which took away quite a big portion of the pictureplane were waaaaaay smaller that I saw them at first, I actually had to correct those studies quite a bit. Now that's a brain right here thats incredibly stuck in one way of thinking, just a craaaaaazy habit that has not been visible to me until today.
This also counts for huge objects in a painting, an entire mountain which looks huuuuuuuge can take only a relatively small part of the canvas. until today I would've naturally painted this thing huge in the beginning and maaaaybe noticed somewhere along the process that this thing shuld be made smaller to look correct.
So yea discovering that felt really great, another awesome thing I noticed which kind of slipped my mind/eyes until today is this:
The term "painterly" kind of suggested for me to always be pretty loose as brushwork is concerned, just letting big brushmarks sit where no detail is needed and just implying all the details. I noticed that I had this mindset even in the focal points of my "painterly" paintings always avoiding to render too much, showing too much detail.
But today I looked closer at one of my favorite paintings which I would consider "painterly" and noticed how tight the focal points actually were and how incredibly dense the details can get in those focal spots. SO yea being loose and "painterly" is all nice but it only seems to work if you are actually getting very focused and tight with the rendering in the areas where the focus should be. I will definitely try this for my next painitngs.
So here are the studies. Notice that those are not shape studies, the accuracy of the shapes was not important to me right now this was all about the size proportions of especially the focal characters as related to the size of the entire canvas.
To make this update not toooooooooo lame as far as images is concerned I also added a quick litte sketch I made trying out this entire "making big objects small on the canvas principle". So each one of those huge statues is taking up a relatively small part of the picture plane (well at least each one is faaaaar away from taking up the entire space), and just using even smaller shapes for the fires and stairs I tried to show the scale. yea I thing this worked, sure this is rough and all but those are some huge statues haha :D The next few days I will try to push this idea with characters, I think there is a whole lot for me to learn in this area especially how to go about composition!
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