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In this demo, I’ll discuss the compositional planning process, symbolism, color choices, and digital painting techniques that went into creating the piece “Half Her Heart’s Duet,” for the purpose of demonstrating digital painting start-to-finish. "Cynthia Sheppard"

Telling a Story

Before starting in on the technical aspects of creating Half Her Heart’s Duet, I want to talk about an often-overlooked aspect of the creation process— storytelling. As artists, it’s easy to get caught up in our technique and forget to ask ourselves critical questions like “why would someone want to look at this?” or “what will people take away from seeing it?” The relationship between the composition and the story it expresses can develop either way; I typically start with an image in my head and the story evolves around it. The important part isn’t how you begin, but realizing how elements that exist outside of the canvas influence the context, mood, and the effect of the piece. By creating a deeply personal internal story, you paradoxically make the work more accessible to a wider audience, who can then create their own internal stories. HHHD captures a moment in the character’s life that seems to be the calm after a recent rough transition.

The symbolism is a synthesis of classic archetypes and personal significance. The key elements of the piece are easy to relate to: a human figure, the portrayal of song as a method of catharsis, and the suggestion of an agrarian lifestyle. These elements are the foundation on which the detail of personal symbolism rests. My hope was to find a balance between the cliché and the esoteric— too universal and it’s trite, too private and it’s inaccessible. These considerations, I think, helped make Half Her Hearts Duet a successful piece.


Composing the Scene

This piece has a very simple composition. When divided into 9 quadrants a la the classic rule of thirds, we see the figure seated in the central plane, and the horizon line between the fence and sky resting about on the bottom third. This technique has been used for centuries from the awareness that it creates a mathematically eye-pleasing format.

For this particular scene, I chose to make the figure central because being able to clearly see the expression on her face is vital to understanding the mood of the piece.

Like with most of my artwork, I began by blocking in basic forms with a large hard round brush. At this stage it’s futile to worry about being a perfectionist (note the “mitten hands” in the Early Form Development slide), but you want to concentrate on getting spacial relationships between the different elements in your piece as close as possible to what you want in the finished art. One trick is to zoom out until the canvas is tiny, and see if you can sense all the shapes in the final image at the reduced size. If something looks off, try reworking the area at this beginning stage so that you don’t carry that awkwardness with you throughout the piece.


Creating a Color Palette

A lot of different idioms came to mind during the first stages of this piece, such as “fire in her heart,” and “heart of gold,” so to me, choosing an analogous warm color scheme was obvious. Warm colors can create many different moods, but all of them strong-— urgency, danger, love, and wrath, to name a few— and to portray an emotional conflict in the character, I wanted all of those moods together.

Using a colorful sky let me create a relationship between the colors in the figure and her surroundings. As you see in the simple color study below, the sky picks up colors in the dress, hair, skin, and ground helping to “bounce” the viewer’s eye around the image.