StudioEye*: Inside the Artist's Studio
Stage 2 of Rainforest triptych: Composition & Colour Design
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StudioEye*: Inside the Artist's StudioStage 2 of Rainforest triptych: Composition & Colour Design |
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The 3 canvases are up on the easels ready
to go. For the composition, large pieces of paper have been taped up
over the top of the canvases in order to sketch the outlines, before
transferring to canvas. It was decided that the area was too big a size to work with for the initial overall composition, so a new set of paper was drawn up (all precisely to scale for the large pictures). When the smaller composition is right then we'll go straight back onto the canvas. |
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Looking very focused and serious (but
actually having heaps of fun!), drawing the overall composition and
starting to decide on colours of some of the elements. You can see I've moved around to the back of the easels to set up this area. You can see the back of the 3 large canvases from this side! Lots of research has been done of plant types, birds, etc for local Queensland rainforest to make sure it's authentic for our area. Dozens of colour pictures have been sourced for reference. You can see some of them taped up during the sketching phase. |
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Since the painting is so big, and has the
potential to have a lot of detail in it, it is important to make sure
that even with that much detail, the viewer still has a calm and
pleasurable viewing experience! The composition has been constructed to lead to eye smoothly from the bottom right, in a "Z" line zigzagging across all 3 panels of the painting. The viewer could almost feel like a butterfly soaring from the rainforest floor across and up towards the top of the waterfall in the distant background! This type of composition will bring all 3 panels together to make sure they make one harmonious scene. |
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Paint Hits canvas!
A consistent colour scheme is chosen for the priming of the canvas - a pale green. The last coat of primer is just to make sure the pre-primed canvas is totally sealed. |
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| Paint Hits feet! |
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| Final sketch of the total composition on canvas over the top of the pale green primer: Left and right sides shown, so you can see the total composition: | ||||
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All the highlights are painted in white so
that the colour over the top of the white will really glow through.
Then the first colour on canvas: the red frog eye of course! |
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Next stage: Painting! |
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