Perspective (Illustration Friday..or not)

(Update: So. Apparently Perspective was not this week's Illustration Friday. Ha! I clearly totally made it up. Nice work. Well, here is my Kelly's Brain submission for this week. Ahem. Continue on.)

Analysis and process after the break.

So this was my first attempt and it felt very very off. I brought it to my Mom, whose art I respect immensely. She pointed out the following issues:
1. Values are too similar. (See the first BW.) There is nothing to separate the background and foreground. She suggested darkening the bug. Also giving him a shadow to connect him with the shelf he's sitting on.

2. Bug's right side lines up too much with the left side of the mirror. Oops. Forgot to change that.

3. It's confusing to have the pattern around the mirror and the shelf.

So I went to work with a plan. I played around with the design in Illustrator and came up with more of a color scheme I liked.

I didn't bring that image in with me to the studio but I tried to remember the feel of it. The result is the final Illustration Friday submission. I definitely succeeded in getting better contrast between for and back ground. Next I'll work on getting more contrast between values with people in a given plane. (The wall, the reflection and the girl are the same value, while the bug and the shelf are nearly the same value.)

Final Assessment:
I think the bug reads better in the final version but I  miss the texture on that left wall.

The red outter frame seems strange. I'm not sure what to do with it or the mirror frame color. The brown shelf is strange. Also I need to be careful to not cut the space directly in half. Bad design. Really this painting has four distinct quadrants with cross overs between 2 and 4 (the figure) and 3 and  4 (the bug.) I could have gone with this and put something in quad 1 that runs off the page to the left.

What I like: I feel like I mixed some colors successfully. Before I started the bug, I asked myself what I wanted and how I thought I'd get there. Then I tried it and was successful. I also came up with a system for labeling my mixes so that I have them as reference later. This is part of the conscious color study I'd like to keep trying. So the bug was a color mixing success and so was that brown shelf. I darkened the brown with Paynes Grey instead of black. To me that's a total victory and makes this whole thing a win.