Argh!  Sometimes you got it, and sometimes you don't.  That first series of compositions sprang forth from my nogging like a geyser.  It was so fun that I thought I'd try it again.  Of course this time I thought I'd get more clever with it, and BLAM!  My creativity slammed head first into a brick wall.  After a few days of stewing on it, I decided I just need to set it free and move on.  I'm sure when I come back to it in a week with fresh eyes, I'll suddenly have all sorts of new ideas for it.  Anyway, here is the unfinished results so far.  As you can see I added a third color, gray, or grey if you prefer.  It allowed me to overlap my shapes, which gave me a new option to create the illusion of depth.

I'm doing a series of abstract images to help reinforce the basic concepts and tools in art.  It's mostly in an effort to improve how I look at composition, but this will also get me thinking about line, shape, area, perspective, depth, etc in their most basic forms.  Here I started in black and white, but next I will try to do the same compositions using color to see how the colors affect the image.

So far I have 9 compositions.

Here are some close-ups…

I did this one mostly absent mindedly.  I didn't have any goals or intentions with it, I just got in there and let my hands do the walking.  It was an entirely right brained experience.  I had to stop myself before I ruined it with too much detail.  I knew I should step back from it for a bit and come at it with fresh eyes to fix any major errors before going on.  So here is where I stopped at.

"Oh, he's So CUTE!"

I can see so many mistakes on this guy right now that it makes me squirm in my seat.  But I gotta call it a night, so I'm posting him now.  I had a lot of fun with this little guy. 

Okay, okay, so I slipped back into value mode tonight.  But I needed to in order to first think about composition.  I'd like to do a full environment piece in the future and I always wanted to do a spooky Castle Dracula location.  Pretty generic, yes.  But I'd like to start here and work it into something more unique.  I'm going to have to do some reseach for this one.  It's going to be fun.

The interesting thing was, already after just a week of doing these color sketches, I was already thinking of color as I worked on this piece.

Woops, I just noticed that I forgot to add a shadow. Just pretend that he's grounded and not floating in mid-air for the time being.

This one was tricky because there is an overall red-violet atmosphere to the image. So I had to adjust the colors of his suit to make him feel like he's actually in that environment. Hopefully I succeeded to some degree.