I tried working with curves before, and very quickly found myself at a point where I couldn’t figure out where to go next.
So I hung it on the wall where I can think about it for months on end. In the meantime, I thought I’d be a glutton for punishment and try again. I’m working at a larger scale with mostly bigger arcs, which I think helps. I expect that I will end up breaking some of the arcs up too. I started with a rudimentary plan:
I ended up shifting the upper circle up a bit though. I used a yardstick as a beam compass to draw the arcs, and that worked out better than I expected. Then I filled in color.
I like how the rose/earthtone combination is going so far, and I can see some possibilities. I need to decide where to go with the brushwork and blending. There is some splotchiness which doesn’t work at this point, although it might be if I separated the panels. I like the flatness in the left panel, but not the transition between the off-white and the brown. The left-middle panel has its own thing going on, kind of like it’s speaking in a different voice from the two adjacent panels. Where the transition between the right two panels intersects with the circle is a problem.
My plan was to bring in my rectangles after laying in the arcs. What if I didn’t? I could use color and brushwork to animate the spaces. I could keep those large whitish flat areas and the watercolor-like immediacy. But I think that’s overthinking it. Apply more paint. See what happens.
