I needed to correct something about a “finished” artwork. It was really bothering me, although I wasn’t sure why. I just did not quite like it, however much I wanted to. The individual elements seemed mostly OK, but… it wasn’t working for me. So I made some changes; are these subtle changes? Or not so subtle?

Here is the Before and After my changes:

The light is probably different for these two photos, so you may find the color and contrast difficult to compare. I did mute the background pattern colors considerably. The color and contrasts on the figures is mostly the same, although a bit different where I carved away portions of both figures.

The primary changes are:

1. For the the background I muted colors & contrast, removed one distracting dimensional element. I did add a soft new element to the drawing.
2. On the left figure I removed a lot of the draper around the head & shoulders, and worked into neck & rib cage a bit.
3. On the right hand figure I reduced the size of the head, and gave him a shard of glass to hold/offer.

For me, this fixed two problems: first that the figures were did not fit well on the panel, being too large and too close to the top. And secondly the background was too dominant and distracted from the featured figures.

I like it much better now, but I won’t know if this piece is really satisfying until I live with it for some undetermined length of time!