Awesome Frog Painting

Wow!  It has been a long haul to get the ideas for the characters.  There are several that have not been posted yet.  The Bell Ringer is one new group. 

I have also started to work on designing the "background." I spent quite some time looking at the tree image as a whole, the sketches, and then at the actual painted image.  Because the painting is so thin and yet so tall- I asked myself, how would I actually look at it? I usually work with images around 18" x 24" and the distance to the viewer from the ceiling is about the same as viewing one of these images.  With this info I ended up dividing the image into thirds and this gave me a start for developing the composition.  Next I divided the image into 6ths. 

So that as you move along viewing the image you will always have a "floating third" to focus on. This means that the action must flow from element to element smoothly.  I will be using gentle diagonals to establish this flow.  Here I use some simple mushrooms to establish this flow.

I won't be using mushrooms for all of this but it is a start.