David Hellman

Lots more changes (click to enlarge). I’ve done a second pass over most of the surface, now. Below you can see the changes isolated from the original draft:

As a reminder, here’s what it looked like before all this:

In some areas, adding detail happens naturally or invisibly, but just as often, the increased detail disrupts whatever was making the image good in its earlier state. For example, the mountainous region on the left side changed a lot between the two versions. I couldn’t just add detail to the rough, because it wasn’t a framework to build on; it was more like a rhythmic notation. I tried to sustain that rhythm while doing a new painting to replace the one disappearing beneath it. Sometimes, though, the rhythm doesn’t translate, and I just have to come up with something different.

Every so often I’ll mess around with the settings to prevent my understanding of an image to cement too much before it’s finished. In this version, I adjusted the Hue by +15 and the Saturation by +20. Even though I like slightly weird colors, somehow this just immediately looks so much more “right.” But sudden changes can dazzle the senses and confuse judgment. A change like this is a pretty significant disruption; color relationships are not equal around the color wheel, so an across-the-board hue shift does not produce a structurally analogous revision. The dynamics change. What do you think of this version? I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet.

Here’s a close-up at 25% scale. I want this to be a lot more detailed, with smaller objects, houses and other things. In a thumbnail like the ones above, the image kind of looks done, but I want it to stand up to much closer scrutiny. You should be able to visit these places, discovering secrets as your eye roams.