Julie,
I struggled for five weeks on this piece and the sister piece. In PS you can do and redo over and over again.
The thing is workflow. I had to design for this project a few major parts to my workflow.
On a Saturday night I went to bed and could not sleep. This was five weeks in to the process. I was so close, but
the shadowing to create depth was ultra difficult. To make the work pop it had to be shadowed. Depth. And a few highlights.
I got up at 4:00 am that Sunday morning, no sleep. I went to work until 11:30 am. I struggled and struggled.
All of the petals were the original colors of the images by Gauguin. I had the shape of each petal right. I had the shadows
very close to all being right, but the colors of each image created a kind of chaos. I can only now see that now as I
describe it to y'all. At that time I was deep in do do. And no rest.
I called my technical mentor at 9:00 am on Sunday. I emailed him a working copy. He did not see the problems artistically. He
is admittedly not an artist. I called my folks right afterwards and emailed them the working copy. They did not understand the
dilemma. But the four of us knew the working copy was very problematic.
I was tearing my hair out. I gave up and shut down my PC.
I then half an hour later booted up and turned a working copy of the image black and white. Adding cyan I made this copy. An hour later
I made another rose sepia copy, which is far more popular.
My technical mentor, my parents do not like this image. My sisters, my friends, etc like this image greatly. My sisters etc have not
seen the previous working copies.
I got it to pop and that is the main success I needed before publishing this work. It was not popping before I made it black and white.
