horror vacui: Setbacks and revelations

Hello all.... I've been working but have little satisfactory finished work to show for it. Yes, yes.... I will tell you my tale of woe...which comes, incidentally, complete with what I am trying to see as a positive outcome. (Oh, it is, it is....it's just hard for me not to want things to work out perfectly, every time, and for everything that I do to be the BEST THING I've ever done, etc....).

So...I've been working on a page for my book...rather desperate to complete ten pages for the SCBWI grant contest as mentioned in the last post. ( I'd really wanted to have completed two new ones already! ) I have long had in mind what I wanted to do.... here are a couple of sketches:

...and here is the pencil drawing before I began to paint:

Well, it turned out...not well. And it wasn't that I made any particular errors....it was difficult for me to put my finger on exactly what I was not pleased with. This led to a fairly miserable mood in which I thought of other pieces that I've worked on recently that I had also been less than pleased with....and they had something in common. But what was it? And then I realized... that sometimes, my penchant for DETAIL is sometimes too much.... too much detail, on too similar a scale, is not as successful as if I were to use it sparingly or in greatly differing scale, if that makes sense. I realized that that I had made that very error recently in the pieces that I consider to have been less successful. My "Heidi" piece, while not terrible, used allover detail (sky and 'grass/flowers') on about the same scale, and the figures were detailed on a similar scale. Same with the cover that I did for Crow Toes... Hmmmmm....

So, I decided to minimize colour... in this version, I planned to 'grey/blue' out the buildings and just keep them lightly outlined...and to do a black outline of a pattern in the sky (didn't get to that point here):

...somewhat better, yes? But then I was able to pinpoint a final criticism of the earlier pieces... again, related to scale. I really am more effective at tight scenes, not crowd scenes, not 'pulled back' scenes. A wide perspective isn't what I do best... particularly since I have the aforementioned tendency to detail everything. Of course, these are things that I can work on... but another consideration is that I have already completed several pages of the book, and want to continue it with the same consistent 'look'...not that I am not already planning to change several pages... so I began another version of this page:

with the woman's figure in larger scale. This was difficult to convince myself to do- I'd really envisioned it containing her figure. I may continue with both. This one I plan to execute with the more minimal colour scheme also. So, positive outcome (realization re. strengths/weaknesses as well as things that don't work so well that I will endeavor to reign in) follows despondent mood.

What else? I started working on the 'perruche perdu' promotional piece; will post that soon. Was planning to post that tonight but alas, a setback in that piece will delay me until tomorrow or the next. I'm not terribly upset about this one...just something that needs to be done.

In older news, I went to another 'Dr. Sketchy' drawing session...liked the model a bit less (too much wig, too much feather boa-maybe I was just sitting in an unfortunate location)- but had fun nonetheless and did a few decent drawings. Here's one: