Critiquing Your Artwork, Part 1
Determining what’s gone wrong in a painting can often be a problem. Learning how to critique your own work can save you hours of agony in the studio, and major bucks at the art store.
Although the following critique is based on an article found in The Pastel Journal, it’s just as applicable to other mediums. The article was written by Robert K. Carsten, a signature member of the PSA and it appears in the June 2007 issue.
Mr. Carsten discusses three stages of developing his artwork, with the first stage being the one I didn’t do. You see, Mr. Carsten begins with a thumbnail sketch, and works out values, drawing perspective, and composition before beginning the actual work. Sometimes he’ll do more than one, with subsequent versions an improvement over the first. Stage two discusses the use of color, and stage 3 is about the final details.
Stage 1: On the left is yesterday’s grayed version which I’m substituting for the value thumbnail. On the right is my updated value sketch, which printed a wee bit blurry and a little too dark, but will suffice for this discussion.
After printing a copy of my grayed image, I used a 9B pencil for darkening, and a white charcoal pencil for lightening. Some of my corrections aren’t reading well on the screen, but they’re there, and my printed “thumbnail” now resembles the photo’s values more closely.
So is there anything successful going on here? Well, I started with a photo that had an excellent composition to begin with. My drawing perspective is accurate, and there’s a distinct “O” shaped pattern formed by shadow areas surrounding the center of interest, which is the waterfall.
The composition is following the rule of thirds pretty closely. The crest of the upper and lower falls are located in the upper and lower third of the paper, with the strongest highlight of the lower falls near the sweet spot.
The closest tree, most of which is in shadow, lies in the left third and draws the viewer’s eyes to the top of the falls. The “O” shape of the shadow area then allows the eyes to easily wander back down to the highlighted lower falls.
I like the gray scale image. I even liked the first version, although not as much as the revised one, and I think stage 1 has been successfully completed.
So what’s wrong with this picture?
Since I’m happy with it in gray, that only leaves on thing, doesn’t it? Color.
Stay tuned to this old bat’s channel for stage two of this dissection, which will discuss color temperature and intensity.
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