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« Waking Among the Clouds: Step 1
Waking Among the Clouds: Step 3 »

Waking Among the Clouds: Step 2

Waking Among the Clouds

The first order of business was painting the background scene outside the window. The layout of the buildings and the cloudscape is straight out of ‘Study for Among the Clouds II’ with a few minor adjustments to accommodate the new composition. Obviously the entire view has been cropped to fit the window. When I sketched the two towers the first time, they felt a little crowded, so I shortened the one on the left. Also, although the basic colors are the same, I redesigned both buildings to keep them interesting at their new scale. Since the shirt will be white and still needs to stand out from the clouds, I adjusted the forms of the clouds just enough to keep dark areas behind the brightly lit right side of the figure and bright, high interest areas behind the shadow side of the figure. We’ll see how well it works out when the shirt is painted. I also decreased the overall detail and contrast levels of the clouds to help them recede into the background and create a bigger sense of scale and distance in the painting.

I included a detail of the skyscrapers since they are slightly bled out in the shot of the full painting.

Waking Among the Clouds, by Bryan Larsen

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Waking Among the Clouds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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About Bryan Larsen ~

Bryan Larsen

"I was born on February 12, 1975, and have been drawing as long as I can remember. By the time I was in high school, I knew I wanted to be an artist, although at the time I didn't have a clear idea of how exactly I would use my talents to make a living.

"As I continued studying art, I began to suspect that fine visual art was dead. No one seemed interested in teaching students how to draw well, or paint well. More often than not, my own skills exceeded those of my instructors.

"The only field left that seemed to require good drawing, painting, and compositional skills was illustration, and therefore I began studying illustration at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. I became even more convinced that I had made the right decision in staying away from fine art as I endured course after course of required "drawing" and "painting" classes in which instructors required me to draw with "less focus", or use ridiculous materials such as shellac, glue, sand, salt, etc.

"My second year at Utah State, I met Damon Denys. In discussing Art with him I realized that there were other people who believed that technique and subject matter were indispensable components of any work of art. I then decided that I would work to develop my own painting skills with the purpose of creating artwork that I considered worthy of being called Fine Art.

"Since that time, I have studied on my own: Drawing from live models to learn the human form, studying proper painting techniques from any source I could find ample reason to trust, and developing a philosophy of Art based on reason, and life on earth.

"My goal is to portray the heroic and romantic in human nature and human achievement in a realistic style and a modern setting. I place particular emphasis on composition, technique, realistic detail, proper craftsmanship and consistency of style."