John Singer Sargent's Light Shapes
4yr
Really love the gestural movement that is created by the arrangement of these high key shapes in this Sargent painting. Sometimes it’s as simple as finding a really good S-curve.
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4yr
Thanks Stephen! This is super helpful
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4yr
Asked for help
Ya such great atmosphere and incredibly simple value composition. I'm working on a figure study right now. I'm in the early phases of figuring out the simple value composition. What do you think of this?
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4yr
Thanks for the suggestion @Stephen Bauman. I took your advice and darkened the background a tad more and it definitely made the lights on the torso pop more. Here's the final.
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4yr
If I consider that you would like to emphasize the sweeping top-left to bottom-right gesture of the torso/front leg I would experiment with darkening 4 areas/shapes. The background behind the face, the arm (furthest back), and the leg (also furthest back) and also the light shape of the face/head. The bright light behind the face draws attention to the high contrast edge between the beard/face and the light in the background. Also, I think it's really cool to take your artistic license to frame the figure best by changing the value of the background in a few places- with that in mind I would also darken slightly the back arm & leg so that the highest key shape is a literal diagonal from top left shoulder the bottom right knee. This, of course, is just in the spirit of optimization and while it might improve the attention to the focal point it also has the potential to over-streamline the composition.
