Crash and Burn

Before I get into tonight's topic, I'd like to announce the winning title for the Coed Lodge painting. Jesus Estevez's Red Light beat out Jimmy C's Vacancy by just one vote, and so is declared the winner! Thank you Jesus, and thank you everyone who gave me ideas for the title and everyone who voted! There were some excellent suggestions. I can only use one title, but will keep in mind the others for future paintings.


Now, let's talk about this painting. I have been busily painting for my upcoming shows, and surprisingly, haven't had any disasters in the last month or so. I must have let down guard because this one snuck up on me. It's a 20 x 16 painting of the famous Paris coffee shop, Cafe de Flore where years ago, I discovered the guilty pleasures of a real Parisienne hot chocolate. If you haven't had hot chocolate the way the French do it, you are missing out. Remember a few years ago Starbucks tried it with their Chantico ? Well, that pales in comparison to the rich, sinful experience of the chocolate you get in Paris.


But enough about that. I worked on this painting for about two days, I think, and something was bothering me about it, and I kept fixing this and fixing that but I couldn't seem to make it work. At last, I took a step back and diagnosed the problem, and had to admit that it was poorly designed. No amount of redrawing the various elements or slathering on more paint will fix a bad design.


The basic problem is that it has too many interesting things competing for attention, leaving me with no clear focal point and no clear hierarchy of importance. There is the bicycle, the pedestrian, the waiter, the guy sitting to the left of the waiter, the two umbrellas, an equally bright awning... You see, it suffers from Too Much Of A Good Thing Syndrome.

It also lacks sufficiently large passive area, and the stuff above the awning does nothing for the image. It was simply in my reference photo, and I had a 16 x 20 canvas to fill. A Bad reason to include anything.


So I decided to see if I can drastically alter the composition by subordinating many of the loud elements by significantly lowering their values and obscuring them itno shadow in some cases.

First, I darkened the far umbrella. I don't need two loud umbrellas. One would make the point.

Then I threw the foreground into shadow. The bicycle is an interesting silhouette, but I don't need to define the entire bicycle for the viewer to know that it's a bicycle. I can simplify it a lot by silhouetting only a part of it, and making a big simple dark shape with the rest.

Now, I am only experimenting with big value changes. At this point, I just want to see how the design is altered by manipulating major values. I'm not concerned about color or edges. All I'm doing is mixing a transparent glaze and crudely slapping it over certain areas.

And next, I lowered value of the pedestrian guy. He could have been the star of the painting, but he was too close to the edge so I decided to make him into supporting cast.

I also glazed the awning and everything above it.

It looked better, but It didn't change the fact that all that stuff at the top had nothing to do with my story, so I did what any sensible illustrator would do.

I cropped it. Still kind of hodge podge, but I'm starting to see potential. If I REALLY liked it, and if the surface weren't already so built up, I would then work back into it with appropriate colors using the new value structure. But I don't REALLY like it, so this will never see the light of day beyond this blog. This was a good exercise on a failed painting, though, so I'm not lamenting my loss or anything.

It comes back to the same old lesson. Ya gotta do your thumbnails and plan your composition carefully before you start painting. I know, I know, sometimes you're so eager to get painting you skip the prep part, thinking this pretty nice photo is a good enough sketch. Maybe so, but whenever I get too lazy to properly prepare a composition, I always crash and burn.