Hide and Seek

I taught at the Masters of Digital Painting workshop in Moscow earlier this month by invitation from Max Kostenko. At the workshop, Denis Zilber taught about light, and Serge Birault taught techniques of pin-up illustration. I talked about some rules of composition and then did a demonstration on controlling a composition, starting with this image, which I deliberately made a bit over-detailed and convoluted:

It could be worse, but it's still a mess, right? Almost every artist runs into problems like this sometimes, so I wanted to show how to sort through a flawed and complicated composition.

I took the picture to this point during the workshop:

Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to do more than push the values and colors around. I've spent a couple hours on it since then, trying to take it where I thought it should go. There is one thing still bothering me, but I can't figure out how to fix it without damaging the theme and integrity of the picture.

I've taught before that when you can't control the size at which people will view a piece (like when posting it online, where you can't control monitor size or other things like level of zoom), you should design your composition to read clearly at almost any distance. But when I tried making the silhouettes clear and cropping it so the boy was visible at smaller scales, it lost that epic sense of exploration that I wanted.

A stronger composition? Maybe, but I still like most things better in the other one.

Not to mention that obscuring the monster a bit feels right for a game of hide and seek---in fact I may have pulled him out from the background too much as it is. Anyway, the point is that this one is meant to be seen large so make sure to click on the image. Sorry, thumbnail-aficionados! I guess I have to conclude that no set of rules can cover all compositions.

Thanks to all the people who came to the workshop and made me feel welcome in Russia. It was fun!