Precision: Step 6
Okay, now that we have the upper left and upper right quadrants more or less completed, it’s time to do the same with the next quadrant in line in the clockwise progression. Why clockwise, you may be asking? Well, coincidence more than anything, actually. I am, if you’ll remember, painting the elements from far to near, and the buildings in the upper left just happen to be further away than the wall in the upper right, which just happens to be further away from us than the wine bottle, etc.
Instead of posting just one sudden *poof* image of the lower right quadrant being finished, I’ve included progress shots of the tiles and bottle as they are completed. The tile design I crafted up with the primary goal of continuing the color scheme started in the buildings as it fits into the general composition that I mentioned in my last post. I also wanted something that was a little “busy”, to help balance the details present in the buildings, as opposed to the very simple field presented by the plain wall in the upper right quadrant. The only real trick with the tiles is making them appear three dimensional and shiny. That’s not too hard when you’re painting something that’s right in front of you, but it’s a little more difficult when you have to make it all up on the spot. This was another consideration while I was coming up with the tile design. I wanted it to be somewhat busy, but not too frighteningly difficult.
The fun part about the bottle and glass is that the tiles and wall are showing through the bottle, which is in turn showing through the glass. So the visual trick presented there is a sort of multiple distortion through colored and curved glass. A similar effect is planned for the figure where his left eye is distorted through the lens of his glasses, as you will see for yourself soon enough.
I should probably explain the context of these elements in the corner before I tie this step up. The decorative tile pattern should be obvious enough, given the theme of “precision”. Some may at first think that an apple has no significance in regards to the theme, but if you’ve studied the long history of agriculture at all, you know that the big, juicy, flawless apple that you take for granted in the super market is actually the product of centuries of deliberate human selection, not to mention agricultural technological developments. When I’ve been on archaeological surveys in the field in the past, I’ve discovered ancient corn cobs that had only six kernels around their circumference. And while those cobs were already a product of hundreds of years of human selective farming, they were still a long way from our modern, very robust corn cobs. Anyone who has discovered wild raspberries or strawberries in the mountains knows how much they differ from their domestic cousins who have been cultivated under the watchful eyes of humans for so long. With this in mind, the wine is a further refinement of the already very careful and precise process that gave us the humble modern grape. Fans of fine wines know very well how spectacularly precise that process can be, and how small deviations in the process can yield profound differences in the resulting product. And of course, a factory produced wine glass that is identical to hundreds and thousands of other glasses coming down the same assembly line is only possible by an amazing degree of precision in the technology and machines used to produce them.
So although the elements in this corner are all meant to look very nice, they are also deliberate reiterations of the general theme and are meant also to give that simple act of the figure tuning his guitar that much more gravity.
