Two Shores: Step 10
Well, the day of reckoning has finally come, and it’s time to put this bridge in place. As I mentioned before, I’m going to have to keep things pretty dark over here to prevent those distant lights from losing their luster. The result of this will be a sort of inverted distance emphasis that’s pretty atypical (at least for me) in paintings. What on earth do I mean by “inverted distance emphasis”? No, I’m not trying to impress you with fancy terminology I learned in art school. To be honest, most people in art schools would be lucky if their vocabulary rivaled that of a certain leader of a certain country whose name I won’t mention because I’d like to avoid bags of potential hate mail. What I mean by “inverted distance emphasis” (actually, that does sound pretty grand–I’m not pretentious, I swear) is that usually the elements of a painting that are closest to you are the ones that are intended to receive the most attention. The background elements, in that case, are often used as a compositional means of forcing or leading your eye to those important foreground areas. So when I say “inverted”, I’m talking about the opposite, where–as in this current painting–the items of real importance are actually located in the background, and all that wonderful foreground space is actually just there pointing you in the right direction (has anyone noticed yet that the bridge is essentially a huge arrow saying “HEY! Look at the skyline”? This is what we call a blatantly obvious compositional tool. You have to be careful with these kinds of things, lest people begin to think you received your compositional schooling in a Hollywood film studio)
Finishing the bridge is actually pretty easy work, and there’s not a whole lot to say about it. It’s really a simple matter of filling in the interior with burnt umber, and then carefully adding some subtle metallic accents with a bit of gray to indicate where the fading light is catching the side beams and supports. After that, I get to add more lights (yay!) to indicate the flow of traffic–the closest light is, remember, a red tail light to subtly indicate that we are both physically and metaphorically moving TOWARDS the distant shore. And in fact, lights are so fun, let’s go ahead and add some cute little pairs of them all along the edge of the bridge. Don’t tell me engineers don’t think the same thing when they design bridges themselves. Seriously though, these are a good way of reinforcing the curve of the bridge, which–if you’ll recall my earlier Hollywood comment–is actually a compositional tool leading you toward the distant shore. Excellent.
