See the original here
And see the rest of my hands here
I wanted to do something on a bigger size paper, and have had a lot of success with hands recently. Ironically, i don’t think that this painting is as good as many of my other hand paintings/drawings.. Maybe it’s because of the size. On the other “hand” – haha – there seems to be something nicer going on when stepping back… I get blind looking at my own stuff, though.
I’m thinking about maybe cutting it out so the hands are more horizontal and get rid of the white edge.
Re: stepping back – that’s it. You can think of a painting as a mosaic. The coarser the details/brushstrokes/pixels on a screen/… the more distance the viewer (= yourself) needs. Also, the larger the size of this mosaic, the further away you need to get in order to take it all in. Comparison: a miniature vs. a painting by Monet.
Something else you could try: Regarding black as a colour with its own atmosphere. The thing is to use black with a purpose. There are many different black pigments, brown-ish, blue-ish, yellow-ish, and they mix or influence their surroundings in different ways.
Unless you want to buy a range of black pigments though, the alternative is mixing near-blacks with complementary colours, like blue and brown, red and green. That way you can vary the blacks by varying the background cool/warm just as you modulate the hands, rather than just having one pigment thick and thin. Perhaps that’s what’s bothering you here. The background also looks a little bit like mine do when I’m about to loose interest or get annoyed because I don’t know what I’m doing and just keep on doing something…
I think you’re right about that. I think i got annoyed with the painting and just wanted to finish it, so the black background ended up a quick and “dramatic” solution. Maybe i ought to have mixed another colour in – green for example, or just leaving out the black completely.
Thanks for your comment!
I think the study of the hands is fantastic but agree that maybe there is too much black on the page for the composition.
I quite like the black background, it makes it more graphical, and also makes the colours pop out. It makes the hands look like they’re coming out of rhe shadows. You might lose that perspective if you crop it. Maybe paint the rest of the edge black? Or slightly diluted black just to lose that contrast with the white edges?