I’ve been working on this piece for at least 6 months, probably longer (I don’t trust the “Date Created” stamp on a file that has lived on three different computers through its life.) I don’t know that it is done yet, but I think it is getting closer; I’m really hoping I can hurry it along in time to send to Confluence. (Livejournal readers have seen this at least once before.) It’s at the point where it’s really more “fine printing” than “image development”; the tweaks are getting subtler, I’m not moving things around anymore. And while I love Vue, I am finding that printing certain kinds of renders is incredibly frustrating — fine detail, particularly things like leaves on trees, or in this case, the strata details, don’t print at what for a lack of a better word I will call appropriate texture. (I know there are people who go straight from Vue to print, with no postwork in Photoshop. I don’t know how they do it; of course, I’ve never seen their prints in the flesh either.)
Of course, how to crop it probably counts as more than a minor tweak, and there are three versions I currently can’t decide between:
What I think is the hardest is trying to figure out what best serves the story, rather than just being the prettiest; I have a sneaking suspicion when I do these landscapes (and there are a lot, they just all seem to take at least a year from conception to print; Summer’s Exile is the only one currently for sale) that the story I’m trying to tell is too heavily encoded in my own personal symbology to be legible, or even intriguing, to the viewer.
Edit: of course, a mere day after posting this, I decided what it really needed was the action of birth. So this one gets added to the possibilities:
And I am still not sure if it’s going anywhere, or will be eventually filed under “Technical Exercise.” It’s definitely not “done”
