From the Artist: This is an experimentation with a limited color palette. For me art is all about color and texture.
From the Painting Guide: The four colors of this painting project certainly work well for rock colors! And I love the gloriously deep dark background, which adds such sense of depth.
Things to Consider When Looking at This Painting:
Sense of Form: Look at how the direction of the brushmarks, particularly those sweeping around the outer edges of the rocks, contribute to the sense of form or shape of the individual rocks. Short, back-and-forth brush strokes just wouldn't do this, nor would an outline which you then "colored in" arbitarily.
Texture: I'm very partial to texture in a painting myself, but need it to be texture that's relevant to the subject. In this painting there are a few areas where the texture doesn't related to an individual rock, and I find it visually distracting. That said, I've had it happen in my own paintings where I've painted over something and ended up with irrelevant texture (see Painting Problem Solver: Irrelevant Texture).
Shadow: With a subject where there are a lot of individual objects each throwing a shadow, it's crucial to have them all falling in the same direction to get a true sense of realism. The very round rock in the center of the composition, for instance, has a shadow cast almost the whole way around it. This wouldn't happen with the single light source you get in nature (i.e. the sun). (See also: Landscape Painting: Which Direction is the Sun Shining From?.)
From the Painting Guide: The four colors of this painting project certainly work well for rock colors! And I love the gloriously deep dark background, which adds such sense of depth.
Things to Consider When Looking at This Painting:
Sense of Form: Look at how the direction of the brushmarks, particularly those sweeping around the outer edges of the rocks, contribute to the sense of form or shape of the individual rocks. Short, back-and-forth brush strokes just wouldn't do this, nor would an outline which you then "colored in" arbitarily.
Texture: I'm very partial to texture in a painting myself, but need it to be texture that's relevant to the subject. In this painting there are a few areas where the texture doesn't related to an individual rock, and I find it visually distracting. That said, I've had it happen in my own paintings where I've painted over something and ended up with irrelevant texture (see Painting Problem Solver: Irrelevant Texture).
Shadow: With a subject where there are a lot of individual objects each throwing a shadow, it's crucial to have them all falling in the same direction to get a true sense of realism. The very round rock in the center of the composition, for instance, has a shadow cast almost the whole way around it. This wouldn't happen with the single light source you get in nature (i.e. the sun). (See also: Landscape Painting: Which Direction is the Sun Shining From?.)