16 x 20
Oil
Artist: Susan Tyler
In the previous post I discussed one of the two main methods that I use to decide what I am going to paint. Above is a painting titled “The Conversation”. It is an edited scene. It took me months to work out that scene. At first I didn’t spend a lot of energy on it. In fact I don’t even think that I saw the scene as a painting. I passed by the scene every Tuesday when I went to my weekly painting group (I will discuss painting groups later). When I passed the spot, I would pause and smile. About a month before I painted this, it dawned on me, that the scene would make a good painting. There were no people in the scene that I was putting together in my mind. The colors were a little duller and the light was different. The architecture was slightly different.
About 3 weeks ago, the day arrived for me to “capture” the scene. I asked two of my friends to position themselves in the scene, relax and talk. This was a natural for them, because they are good friends and often have conversations between them. While they were talking, I took about 20 photographs for many angles. After downloading the pictures to my computer, I studied the scene that was still in front of me and the pictures of my friends talking. I created a couple of thumbnail sketches to guide me in my editing. I then started painting the scene. The major elements that were edited: 1. The two people in an intimate conversation–that as I said was posed, but perfect for the scene, so I painted them as I saw them. 2. The architecture- I changed out one of the windows so that all of the horizontal lines helped lead the eye to the center of interest, the friends. I also subtracted and simplified the furniture and the windows in the building behind the friends. 3. I enhanced all of the colors in the scene. 4. The last, but probably the key edit was the light. The actual scene was bathed in dabble light shinning through the trees, I found that when I tried to paint the dabbled light, it was too complicated and confusing to the eye. That is when I decided to make the light as big areas of sunlight.
Most of the editing, discussed above, was made in the process of the thumbnail sketches, the only major edit made after I started painting was the adjustment of the light source.
