The Color of Light: An Artist's Blog

Sometimes a composition looks great in your head or a reference photo, but once you start painting it doesn't quite add up. That's what happened with this piece I worked on recently. It's a photo I took of the flowerbed in my front yard last spring. 

At first I really liked the "L" shaped composition in the photo and was planning on painting it pretty much as shown in the reference. But once I started in on the piece, it felt unbalanced. All the white snapdragons on the left were overpowering the piece and drawing too much attention. 

I made the executive decision to add another snapdragon on the right to balance out all that activity on the left. And I think it worked. Using artistic license to make a painting work is fun and effective.