The Final Piece
Sketch and beginning to paint
The “Red Sun Raven” is a composition that interprets various parts of nature, mainly the forest or wooded areas. I used contrast, shape, and space to represent the raven and it’s home.
The composition is acrylic paint on a 16”x 20” canvas.
The warm hues of the sun, background, and dead tree contrast with the cooler tones of the bird, leaves behind the flower, and the leaf just to the left of the bird, caressing the sun. The sun is a solid crimson lake hue, similar to the color of a sunset or sunrise. The intensity of the red brings emphasis to the center of the artwork, thus drawing the eye to the raven in the center. There is contrasting saturation within the dead tree behind everything in the composition. Towards the front of the tree I used lighter, and even perhaps warmer brown hues than the darker, more saturated brown hues in the background. This creates the depth for the tree, the out-stretching branches and roots.
With the cool tones on the raven, I created a gradient of varying hues. The body and wings have gradients ranging from just grey to black, or more slate-grey hues, getting lighter or darker or more saturated with blue.
The leaf, which wraps itself around the sun, I tinted the leaf so I could have an olive green to represent the lightness. I mixed said green with a sienna hue to create the center stem of the leaf, drawing the eye in from the outside to the stem.
The flower in the lower right is loosely based off of a morning glory, which ties into the red sun of a sunset or sunrise. I chose a baby-pink hue as the base color of the flower, accenting it with ballet-shoe pink. I chose to contrast the flower with green leaves, this contrasts the sun and the yellow ochre background.
I used rather long brush strokes, leaving crisp edges around every shape. Within the shapes I feathered paint in, many of times I added white or black directly on to the already painted sections of the composition to tint or shade each component.
Overall the composition represents elements of the forest, yet some components have a deeper meaning. Morning glory flowers are rather invasive, but they have something oddly beautiful about them. They bloom and die within a single day, leaving the next day to bloom again, the flowers can also represent mortality. The raven is just a beautiful bird in general but in the context of the composition it represents insight or wisdom. The dead tree ties in by just being what it is, it can grimly accompany the insight aspect of the raven.
