Consider the Story in the Composition

Trumpet Vine (Campsis) with Canna.
One of the things that digital art is teaching me is how to think about story while I'm composing and deciding on artistic treatment. Stories don't have to be complex, as long as they transmit a concept.

One is accustomed to thinking of the flowers as the star of the show, especially red ones, so the eye finds the flowers first, but in this case, it's not about the flower, which is uncomfortably washed out. Notice how quickly your eye drops to the beautiful bark that glows beneath the flower and flows along the trunk. Then it slides up the colorful stained glass canna stems where the cool elegance of  emerald foliage stops you, makes you linger in the canna shapes. Finally you realize that under consideration is a trumpet vine flower,  hot, glaring, and leaning against a pole with a magazine-model's studied coolness basking in a lavish setting.

The subject is not the flower, but the attitude. I keep hearing that song..."I'm too sexy for my shirt..."

Fortunate Event Number 4

This fall stacked up to be a series of fortunate events that began when the printer head clogged beyond repair. Weeks of brain-draining research and assessment later, that decision was made which opened up art card printing right about the same time I was making concept break-throughs that needed a different media than Pastels. I just didn't want to even think about these using pastels.

That's where I was back in November when I discovered Joseph Raffael. He was featured in Watercolor Magazine. After a visit to his website I bought his book, (which I highly recommend). I fell in love with his process and especially his older work. In it I saw what floats around in my head: A mixture of abstraction, realism, and jewel-tone color. It combined neatly with what I was discovering about value, color inversion, and abstraction through Photoshop.

So in the first week of December we had a morning with pretty light. I went to the garden to see what could be found – Joseph Raffael abstraction+realism still strongly in mind. For an instant I was disappointed-what will I find in a garden of brown bushes and sticks? And then I kicked myself. “Think like an artist, look for the shapes of shadow and light, the edges, the movement of these shapes and spaces…color can come later.”

Here is 'Spirea Dreams 3' from that session. There were quite a few that worked out (7) and I had fun turning them into cards…which I’ll post on the card blog. I keep thinking they would make really cool watercolors if done much larger than life. It will be a while before my watercolor legs are strong enough to take on a project like that, so until then, the digital versions are really cool.