Half Her Heart's Duet - Part 4

Click any pictures to enlarge - Hit 'X' or Close to close the view



Using Symbols

Sometimes the non-focal elements of a piece can be just as important as the subject. In the case of Half Her Heart’s Duet, I used background elements to tell the viewer a bit more about the girl’s life. Every farm has to have a crop, so I painted a glowing strawberry-shaped fruit on a thorny vine-— a difficult harvest. And there’s only one clearly showing, another partially faded on the ground, suggesting that it’s been a bad year. The vines seem almost incidental, but I probably painted them over 3 times to get them to look that way. In an older version I had glowing fruit everywhere, but you could barely see what it was, and with the paper everywhere it looked busy and didn’t fit the mood.

To paint the vines and the farmhouse, I used a hard angled brush similar to the one I used on the fabric. I pulled a lot of oranges from the sky and dark hues from the fence to mute the areas against the vivid figure. Afterward I textured the whole area with a large grungy pattern to give it an earthy feel.

The burning sheet music was not only symbolic of the girl’s catharsis, but an element that added motion to an otherwise quiet scene. For the large sheets of paper I loosely drew patches of color and erased around the edges with a hard brush to create the rips and tears. For the burnt edges I painted using a darker color and enhanced it with the Burn Tool set to Shadows. The Burn Tool simultaneously makes things dark and enhances color, so I made sure the dark color had a red cast for that “freshly-singed” look. The fire was a bit more random, created by making strokes of highly saturated oranges and yellows, then going over them with the Dodge Tool on Highlights for maximum luminosity. After everything else was finished and I’d flattened my canvas, I added a little glow of yellow using an Overlay layer.





Links

Cynthia Sheppard's CG Gallery Homepage

Cynthia Sheppard's Website

Half Her Heart Duet, Final Picture