behind the Valley

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Comment by Huda jodah A.Omar on November 27, 2011 at 3:11

thank you very much Richard you helped me a great deal as i hope that it will show in my next painting .

Best regards

Comment by Richard Robinson on November 25, 2011 at 15:04

Hi Huda, thanks for your painting, here are my thoughts on it:

 

 

Design

There's good variety in the major masses to make this an interesting design. The distant mountains seem to be flattened out a little which makes me wonder why you chose to do that since jagged mountain peaks seem to be more visually exciting than rounded hills. The big curving line of those mountains up to the left strikes me as a little unnatural and over simplified too. The curves in the riverbank on the left also have the look of being symbolic rather than keenly observed. Be careful of duplicating shapes (big and small) because that is our tendency but it is not the tendency of a landscape. The false horizon at the base of the mountains should be flat and horizontal.

 

Colour

I like the fact that you have pushed your warm and cool relationships but I do feel that you've gone a bit over the top with some of the oranges on the left in the middle and far-ground. These colours need to be dulled more by atmospheric perspective in order to give a better sense of depth. as should all the colours in your distant mountains. I'm intrigued by your colour variations in the sky - this is the second thing I notice when I glance at the painting. Although the subtle modulations of hue you've introduced are really very beautiful to look at, they do detract from the realism of that area. May I suggest you undertake some cloud studies to hone your abilities in this area? If you also take several different cloud photos and increase their saturation level (colour vibrancy) in any photo editing software you will see more easily where your colour changes should normally occur in a cloud for a given lighting situation.

 

 

Brushwork

It's great to see you creating a rich variety of marks from the soft swirls in the clouds to the chunky palette knife work in the show and the big brushwork vs fine lines in other areas. It's also nice to see you experimenting with lost and found edges in the top of your distant mountains and in a few other spots and I encourage you to continue following that idea. A couple of areas where your brushwork is lacking are in the trees on the left and in the water. You have brushed the trees to look like clumps of grasses and used all horizontal strokes in the water which spoils the opportunity to create any vertical reflections so the water doesn't look as reflective as it could because of that.

 

 

Realism

There are a number of things spoiling the illusion of realism in this painting - those I've already mentioned plus a few others but they all come down to lack of observation really. You have changed quite a few things in this painting to make it different from the photo, but I don't know that all those changes have been improvements. May I suggest that before you do an large painting again where you change this around that you try a few small ones of the scene first trying just to duplicate exactly what you see. That may be boring for a while but in this way you build a better understanding of the subject and are then more able to take liberties with it without losing the illusion of reality.

 

Hope that helps.

R.

 

Comment by Huda jodah A.Omar on November 21, 2011 at 3:11

thanx Casey i am trying

Comment by Casey Toussaint on November 20, 2011 at 5:39

I love your choice of colors.