Unrefined or Lack of Detail
This painting is reasonably detailed: the problem is with refinement. The underlying drawing is weak: although the rat looks like a rat and the plants look like plants, they seem to have been arbitrarily placed within the composition, and as a result, the image doesn’t have much impact. In illustration, it’s important to tell a story or evoke an emotion with your work. Why is the rat standing there? What’s it thinking about? Why are there flowers on its back? What’s going to happen next? All the details in the world aren’t going to save an image that leaves the viewer thinking “Who cares?”
Of course, Epilogue doesn’t reject submissions for being boring. The unrefined/lack of detail rejection has more technical roots. The grass in the background is all on the same plane, and has little variation in lighting and colour. The fur on the rat’s back looks like it was done in a hurry, leaving what I always call “crispy edges”. That is, the rat’s shape was painted in using the predominant colour, then some texture was added on top. The texture didn’t do anything to define the edges, so there’s a distinctive unfinished look going on there.
Compositionally speaking, there are some areas where the viewer’s eye is being led straight off the canvas. The rat’s nose is too close to the bottom, and there’s nothing there to reel the eye back in. If I were repainting this, I’d move that nose up a bit, and frame the bottom edge with a curve of plants and rocks that would echo the contour of the rat’s body. Then, there’s that sprig of blue flowers–they’re pointing straight to the upper right corner, and the clouds are following them, creating a strong diagonal. Diagonal lines are very dynamic, and the eye will always go where they go. In this case, that’s right out of the picture. It’s a good idea to avoid any lines that point directly at the corners, to begin with: that’s the quickest way to lose the viewer’s eye.
The plants themselves are almost all on one plane, which I touched upon earlier. One excellent way of creating depth within a picture is to have objects going in and out of the picture plane, as well as from side to side. (An extreme example of this would be those funny comic-book panels where there’s a tiny figure with a giant hand reaching out for the viewer.) In this case, folding one of those leaves back would do fine, and possibly angling those bluebells forward to curve gracefully over the rat.
The main suggestion I’d give myself, if I could go back in time and tap myself on the shoulder as I worked, would be to involve the rat more with its surroundings. It’s perfectly possible to do a very successful painting of someone/something just sitting there, but it still needs to interact with its environment. A few blades of grass bending as the rat leaned against them, a crawling insect for the rat to look at–anything at all to give the figure some context, and the image some semblance of a story. Think of it this way–let’s say I was telling you about my day, and I said I saw a rat sleeping peacefully in a sunlit field. It’s hardly groundbreaking news, but it’s much more informative than saying “I saw a rat” and leaving it at that. This picture is telling its friends it saw a rat at the moment.
The colour palette isn’t doing much at the moment, either. The grass is green. The bluebells are blue. The rat is black. The sky, for some reason, is pink–or at least, the clouds are. (Since I painted this, of course, I can tell you why: it was supposed to be sunset. That is not coming across, however.) They’re nice enough colours, but there’s nothing overly exciting going on there, and the effect is drab. Establishing a more distinct light source and getting rid of the gray and black in the fur will help with this problem, but this colour scheme could be a thousand times better. For example, imagine that sky in brighter hues, wine reds and flaming oranges, set alight by the sinking sun. There would be glowing halos of backlighting around the rat and the plants, and warm blushes of light shining through the rat’s ears. The foreground would be deeply shadowed, and much more dramatic and mysterious. Those clouds could be dispensed with entirely, avoiding the compositional problem with the upper right corner.
VERDICT: This isn’t fantasy art at its best, but it’s getting close to Epilogue quality. At the moment, while the individual parts are reasonably realistic, they don’t come together to form a convincing scene. With some more consistent lighting, some better use of colour, and a little attention to perspective, it would be approved.
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Article by Socar Myles.
