Finished!

Well, I finally killed off the rest of the background on that painting of Theresa. Since I'm not only lousy at self-promotion, but kind of mediocre at titles, I'm calling it "The Shock." Let's look at how I changed the background:

Final Painting

Original Background

I thought the squiggles were too thick - overwhelming the figure. And all it really took was going back to my compositional source material to figure this out. What source material? Gustav Klimt, of course. Apart from the blue fever theme, the whole thing was designed as a photo-inverse of a gold period Klimt. It didn't completely turn out that way, but you can see what I mean:


Why on earth would I do that? Well, the short answer is that's just how I thought of the composition, when it popped into my head. The analytic answer, I suppose, is that painting takes such a long time, and there's so much room in a painting to put in interesting things, that sometimes I do stuff like that just to see if I can get it to work. Lately, I've been thinking about graphical elements in the backgrounds, so this was a natural development along those lines.

I hope you enjoy it.