Project No.5: Uh... Blobs?

Emphasis & Focal Point

Objective: For this project, we are to pick a painting from either the Renaissance or the Baroque periods and render it into simple biomorphic shapes in both grey tones and colors. The products should both look compositionally interesting and not too recognizable as to whether what is the original painting is. The main purpose of this project is to be able to know how to create focal point using emphasis.

Progress: I find this project an interesting one as we get to take famous paintings and turn them into blobs /XD Beautiful blobs of course... but still blobs.
However, my excitement got killed when I learned that we have to work with acrylic paint AGAIN /omg 

The good news is that it actually didn't go that bad for me this time around since the shapes are much simpler and I got to decide the value changes on my own. So thank God /sweat

The painting I decided to go with is Salome With the Head of John the Baptist:

I wanted to go with a religious painting being the Christian that I am. Although this is probably not the most spiritually uplifting picture ever (lol) but I found it intriguing so I went with it anyway. Here are the sketches that I did for this project:

I was looking at the painting while doing the first few sketches and so by instinct I just drew what I saw so they came out looking more like exact silhouettes of the painting rather than simple unidentifiable shapes. Then after I figured out all the components of the painting, I decided to just let my hand do whatever it felt like and so the beautiful blobs came out :))

In class our professor told us how an overlapping part from two shapes is a good place to do the focal point and so I did just that here with my artwork. I let John's head overlapped with the platter and decided to let that part be red since the head was chopped off so the red represents the blood basically. Since the hand on the right is holding onto the head, I thought it was perfect to turn it into an accent shape to help guide the eyes to the focal point and so I did :3

For the color choice, I just chose what came naturally to mind. The red was obviously explained. Then, since my focal point is a pretty dark-valued color, I had to use lighter colors for Salome's shape to create the contrast needed to emphasize that focal point. I picked violet for the background because I wanted to contrast the positive and negative spaces. With that I basically created a double emphasis: the background helped us zoom into the shapes then the shapes help us zoom into the focal point. At first, I was thinking of doing the background in just solid color (I think this could have furthered the negative and positive space contrast much more) but I decided to go with gradient because I just really like gradient, I guess. Finally I did the accent shape in baby blue because it's a cool color like violet and as light as the green and yellow so that way, it will be able to stand out yet not having to much contrast that it diverts the attention away from the actual focal point.

After I got all the colors figured out, I simply rendered the grey-toned one according to the values of the colored one and then I'm done :)

Thoughts and Feelings: I think this project turned out pretty ok. I'm especially proud that I did not do too badly with acrylic this time around IMO. Makes me feel like I've improved a lot /please

I think some things I could have done better was probably smoothen the blending/shading on the acrylic one and the background gradient on the colored one.

Anyway, tell me what you think :)