Lost

Trying to model some moss, and seemed like it needed a little… something extra. So I turned it into a scene.

It also gave me the chance to do an impromptu experiment - I broke the rules of composition by deliberately making the subject easy to miss at a glance. Given that was a deliberate artistic choice, what’s your response? Negative, like frustration or annoyance? Or Positive, delight or surprise?

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I think it looks pretty good. I notice the little guy in the middle pretty quickly. Interesting technique lol there was a couple of things I’d like to point out though. I feel like the moss could use a bit of color variation between some darker and lighter hues of green, and possibly a bit of brows thrown in. Moss is never completely one or two shades. Also, the droplets seem to be just a tad large(I know its supposed to take away from the main dude in the middle) but I think they could use a bit of variation in size and shape as well. The material for the droplets is nice though. Other than that it looks good :slight_smile:

Sorry, anopheles, but you can’t ‘break’ the rules of composition. Regardless of what you think you have there, what you do have is an image of water droplets improbably suspended from thin green stalks. Now, you may be hiding Waldo, Carmen SanDiego and the Stanford Marching Band in there somewhere, but whatever! if we can’t see it, it don’t count.

It’s actually kind of cool, in an organic abstract way. I could imagine seeing it on a wall in some hotel lobby or hallway outside a conference room.

What do you mean you can’t break the rules of composition? Of course you can, at least insofar as they are rules at all. If you are arguing there aren’t rules - only compositions that work and compositions that don’t - that’s one thing, and I’m inclined to agree. But a whooole lot of people do accept that there are formal rules about where to place the elements in your scene to make it visually compelling, and I deliberately broke a bunch of them making this image. I could get into a very long ramble about whether fibonacci spirals and rules of thirds vs golden ratios, or talk about “leading the eye” through a picture are genuinely a good path to visually pleasing images or conventions that people learn, and adherence to convention is interpreted as visually pleasing between those in the know, but I don’t want to get overly tedious…

I’m also confused that you say you can’t see the subject. Really? You can’t see the little guy hanging off the stem smack dab in the centre of the picture? Like I said, I deliberately made him small and vague so that you don’t seem him first, and might not see him at all if you only take a glance at the picture (the piece is called “Lost” for a reason) - but he’s not particularly hidden.

I mean, if you’re saying that the picture is a bad or frustrating picture because the subject is hard to see and easy to miss, sure, I get that.

Also, if I haven’t driven you away completely, could you expand a little on why you think the dew is improbable? I was working from references like this: http://ak.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/2750555/preview/stock-footage-macro-of-dew-drop-on-moss.jpg http://pixdaus.com/files/items/pics/1/1/590101_7a6bfa4cde575df95a1576fdb4689870_large.jpg - is it one of those cases where reality is weird so the art looks fake? Have I failed to sell you on the scale?

What I mean by your inability to break the rules of composition is that those rules are a description of how your audience views the work. They are in the eye of the beholder, not the artist. So you can ignore them or follow them, but they don’t belong to you to break or not break. Does that make any sense?

I am not saying the picture is bad or frustrating because your little guy is tiny and hard to find. I’m saying that, despite your intention that he be the subject of the work, he is not. He is more in the nature of an Easter Egg in an image of dew and moss. The actual subject is the water droplets, by the rules of composition, that is where you have the greatest contrast in value, so that is what your viewer will look at first.

Now, the droplets are improbable partly because I don’t ordinarilly look at micro photographs, but mainly because they are hanging at an angle. If the image is oriented so that ‘down’ is toward the bottom (the default assumption) then the droplets should be oriented to hang ‘down’ and probably be partly clinging to the top part of the stem, by capillary action.