Blog

My dad fully recovered from whatever bug had been ailing him (his appetite at Panera  attested to that) and so we were finally able to get to a second sitting in yesterday. 

For the second sitting I spent time refining the head and face.  When I moved on to the hands it really  became apparent that I had positioned the figure too far to the left to fully extend the hand holding the bow.  I realized that I had done this because during our first sitting I let him play along with the music and ignored the bow hand, figuring I would focus on that later.  So I really only placed the head and cello shapes as part of the design for this drawing.  I loved the shape pattern I saw and the diagonal division of the canvas with dark occupying the upper right shape and light dominating the lower left shapes so that really was my concept. 

But that flow is disrupted if I put an area of interest (the hand holding the bow) away from that diagonal flow and off to the left, making a design that is already a little heavy to the left even more unbalanced.   So, at least for this composition, the hand holding the bow will have to be placed within the cello shape. By the time I worked that issue out two hours were up so that hand has been wiped away and covered by a tone (see main image). 

Another problem with my simple dark and light design is that the light is roughly equal to the dark in area.  Symmetry is generally uninteresting and that qualifies as a kind of symmetry, just like dividing the picture into two equal areas horizontally or vertically.  By adding gradation from the lower left to the middle, mirroring the angle of the main diagonal, I shift the balance in favor of dark and draw the eye toward my main diagonal movement. A gradation from the lower right back toward the center of interest keeps the line of the cello from leading the eye into that lower corner too far and directs the eye back to the center of interest. 

I will have to decide if the bow hand will work placed farther to the right, within the cello shape, or whether I have to move the composition to the right and create a different visual flow that includes the bow hand extended to the left.  I should be able to make that decision without the presence of the sitter and then the next sitting can be for sketches of the bow hand, finger-board hand and cello instead of the painted oil color sketch I had planned.