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Chantal Sulkow · 01-13-2003, 10:45 AM

Thanks, Karen, I completely agree with you on the cropping issue - the negative space is a huge part of successful compositions!

The reason I did crop was under direction from my painting teacher- he wanted us to maintain the original head sizes in our copies. He encouraged us to do separate compositonal studies, and stressed that the work we did in the museum was not to create a finished piece but for the purpose of studying the painter's technique. When I look at the cropped copies I've done, the appearance of space closing in on the subject is unpleasantly disconcerting. The current copy I am working on is uncropped, and definitely makes more sense to me visually!

The image of the original painting that I have on my computer currently is black and white, but I am going to post it following this for compositional purposes.

01-13-2003, 10:45 AM	#9
Chantal Sulkow Associate Member Joined: Mar 2002 Location: New York, NY Posts: 19	Thanks, Karen, I completely agree with you on the cropping issue - the negative space is a huge part of successful compositions! The reason I did crop was under direction from my painting teacher- he wanted us to maintain the original head sizes in our copies. He encouraged us to do separate compositonal studies, and stressed that the work we did in the museum was not to create a finished piece but for the purpose of studying the painter's technique. When I look at the cropped copies I've done, the appearance of space closing in on the subject is unpleasantly disconcerting. The current copy I am working on is uncropped, and definitely makes more sense to me visually! The image of the original painting that I have on my computer currently is black and white, but I am going to post it following this for compositional purposes.