How to Make Better Art through Fermentation

Well, not real fermentation like good wine, but what many artists call “letting it set” -- I call letting it ferment. Living with a piece of your own art takes courage when it comes time to admit that it isn’t as good as you or I thought it was when it was created.

From this to this (below)

Since the first writing of this post, even the above improvements have been tweaked a bit. I rarely use the S- shape to move the eye through because it is over used so much. But in this case the S-curve proved more useful since the foreground, middle ground and distant atmospheric trees tended to just mush up together.

The above charcoal thumbnails don't use the S-curve and the very first image was fashioned after them. While I liked the bottom two sketches or notans, I failed to pull off the as much dark mass as is in the sketches.

What I Learned

• Somehow this post got sent out in draft form, sorry about that and the gibberish it had originally contained

• I need to pay closer attention to the ratio of darks to lights in my notan in comparison to the roughed in painting

• Just because I have a pregidice against the S-curve, I should be willing to use it

• This will go into the rework pile and after letting it ferment out of sight I'll see if someday I have better solutions. It's not ready for prime time quite yet.