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robertsloan2 [2005-11-23 15:37:36 +0000 UTC]

Okay. I have some thoughts on its flatness, and the word "Unfinished" comes to mind.

I recognized it as a bleeding heart immediately from the thumbnail. I liked the way you reserved white on it and painted around it with the green to make the white elements pop out. But if you want it more rounded with more depth, give it more background. Go into the background with sepia and maybe a photo reference, preferably a fuzzy webcam shot that hasn't got much detail.

Finish the background of the painting and add a couple more flowers into the background in less detail than the foreground flower, reserving white to get them in.

Then when the background is done -- branches, irregular areas of light and dark green, vague leaf-shapes -- the way I did the background on Voodoo Rose and Golden Gerbera is one way to do it, get sloppy and then detail anything that looks like a leaf shape into a leaf shape -- go back to the bleeding heart itself. Carefully picking out the white areas, define them a little cleaner, get the fine line of the dangling stamen and pistils smooth and graceful. It won't work like watercolor but you can get closer to the line by overlapping layers as if glazing with watercolor.

Then detail the white areas. Shadow them with a very fine brush, the smallest acrylic brush you have, and a soft blue-violet for shadows-on-white -- if you reserved white in the background for other white or pink flowers or other bleeding hearts you can swipe a shadow into them too. The pink petals seem shaded just fine, but mixing some opaque green may help clean up the edges on them too. Bringing that opaque green out into the rest of the painting, or even creating more contrast by using a dark sepia chunk-of-branch or gap between clumps of leaves to make more of a value contrast around the flower would do it. Just work smaller and more careful around the flower, then blend out the fix colors irregularly into the background so that they don't look blotchy or contrast too much with the nice transparency of your sap green.

Turning it into a complete intimate landscape with another flower or two in the middle distance and green vegetation fading into as far of the distance as you can manage would make this spectacular. It's halfway there. It just needs some more elements in the painting. Oh and you could put a butterfly in flapping toward it, or a hummingbird or something, if you didn't feel like adding another flower.

Your Scraps look as good as a lot of people's finished work, you know that, right? This one's more a Scrap from unfinishedness than anything really wrong with what's there.

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Morwilwarin [2005-03-09 23:14:29 +0000 UTC]

Whoa...It's certainly artsy, but I don't get what exactly it is. Is it a flower? Good job with the pinks; they're very vibrant. Can't really help with acrylics, though, since I have no experience with them,

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