Madame Butterfly II - Ulysses Blue

[Nonno]

As threatened, here is the next one, with colour!

I've done 2 versions with an obvious difference!
Which works best? (and don't say "neither"!)

Jonathan.

[trevors]

Sounds silly but I had to look for ages to see the difference !
Anyway perhaps the blue background as it echo's the butterfly, the breast would look better if you made a more obvious lighting scheme with maybe a highlight to demonstrate the roundness!

[carolkay]

Jonathan,

I like the last one for obvious reasons. The value change sets off the breast, But I agree with trevors about the highlight.

Sometimes its good to turn the work into a black and white to see the values. I think a some push of the darks would also help.

[Nonno]

Thanks for your comments Trev and Carol,
The light source is simply flash on the camera so it's a bit boring!
Perhaps I should experiment a bit with this aspect.
The darks are darker in reality, they have lost a bit in the scanning process.

I also noticed that the right breast is too round in shape on it's right side, so
there's three things to change for the next one without even deciding on the type of butterfly!

Jonathan.

[lovin art]

Nice work ~ J agree with Carol ~ Smart lady , me I just love such a pretty blue as used here !

[Descartes]

Personally I would have preferred the background to be be grey or towards black. I think in both of these the the figure looks like a figure against a separate background rather than integrating with it. With the butterfly it is not clear how that interacts with the figure (e.g. a tattoo or a real butterfly). Given the flat shape I think it is a real 3d butterfly (ironically) so I'd suggest a bit of shadows on the breast would bind the two parts together.

[kirants]

What butterfly is everyone talking about ?? Oh ok, I see it now. Just was distracted a bit there

Nice one Jonathan. Just to add one more opinion, I do sway towards the first one with the no-blue background. I think the whole thing looks better with that touch of blue of butterfly alone, otherwise, the background seems to gain too much prominence because of the large area of color. I like the tow different perspectives you have of each of the breasts. Given the light source somewhere above and given the shadow cast by the breast on the chest, am wondering if you had the opportunity to get a little more say on the core shadow and reflected light aspects ?

See the links below, am thinking like below, where you see that the underside of the breast is slightly lit, due to reflected light.
http://www.beautifuldrawings.com/0011.paper.jpg
http://www.stanprokopenko.com/blog/2.../direct-light/