This is a painting I actually completed a while ago but after I finished it I was unsure if I actually liked it. It was siting in my art folder for a while and it was annoying me that I had a finished piece I wasn't using so I took to Facebook to ask other people what they thought of it.
The top image shows the sketch I started with whilst the last image shows the final result. I started out with a much warmer colour palette than I ended the painting with.
The scene is of Daenery's eating the heart in the firelight in S1 of Game of Thrones so I started with a warm, firelight kind of colour palette. As I kept painting though, I realised that the warm hues of the painting were giving the wrong impression. What looking at Ross Trans Art reminded me of was the importance of colour palettes and only keeping something if it aids your work. The warm palette was more accurate to the scene, but in my painting the warm oranges and reds used were more indicative of a warm country cottage fire and weren't really working. I didnt want the image to look threatening but I wanted it to look poignant and for the blood on her hand (the most important aspect in the scene) to stand out. Because of this I changed my palette to blues using the colour balance tool. Doing this made the red on the and really stand out and become a focal point in the image.
The stark blue/white in the image also reminds me a bit of hospital lights and I like the unsettling kind of feel created through the use of those colours.
The drawing is actually quite high contrast with dark reds/purples and bright blues. I think the eyes in the image really soften the contrast in the painting, giving the image a softer focus.
Using the "rule of thirds" technique of image layout, that I learnt about earlier in my research, I noticed that the colour use and soft eyes work really well.
The eyes fall into the top third of the grid whilst all the red is contained in the second third. The hair in the last third in the image is again, highlighted in blue. This defines the image creating really nice readability.
The reason I didn't like the image personally after finishing is that I thought it just looked a bit plain. I thought that it also wasn't very obvious who the drawing was of and that the brushstrokes were all very uniform and a bit boring. I don't feel like I committed fully to the more expressive brush strokes in the hand and hair so they weren't made use of very well.
These are the responses I got on facebook after asking for peoples opinions on this peice.
I got quite a lot of positive responses. One even supporting the use of colour and layout I talked about earlier.
Because of this I chose to add it to the selection of prints that I'm taking to Deecon.
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