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Sunday, February 21, 2010

Deadheading - before and after


This is a painting from 10 plus years ago. My daughter looks to be about 12 or 13 here and she is now 25. Again, I left the compostion pretty much the same but tried to improve it. I was a tentative painter back then, and so I want to give some of these older paintings a freshing up. It is so much easier to just paint when everything is pretty much there already but to play.

For this particular painting I wanted to fix the central figure trimming her up a bit as she seemed to be wallowing in the oversized t-shirt,and fix the arms/hands. Afterall, she is deadheading and you can't even tell where her arms are or what they are doing. I also darkened the garage wall in shadow and lightened the side facing the sun. I added more color and shape to the grass and now it definitely needs to be mowed. I totally revamped the clematis to bring more unity and flow to it; same thing with the sedum, the lilies and the dianthus that Liz is deadheading. Darkening the garage wall sure made those lilies pop. I removed the poppy seed pods as they were just confusing the issue I think. I left a few of the still blooming poppies in for color; I also fixed the garage roofline and basketball hoop and added the Masters lock, which is still in use today.

2 comments:

Travelingrant said...

Wow, that really improved! I like the new version a lot.

Unknown said...

Oh God, I am 25.