Portland Head light beak avoidance and obligue form recession diagram

Here is the light house I painted the other day. This photo was taken in the late afternoon and I made the painting in the morning and noon hour but you can get the general idea . Below is my painting and below that a numbered diagram that I will use to discuss beak avoidance. I have written before about beaks here.. The actual site is wicked beaky.


Here's what is going on at each of those numbers.

• #1, is the main beak area, I have minimized it by making it about the same value as the water around it, I dropped the contrast in the area to make the beak shape less assertive. There is also a camouflaging pattern of shadows and accents that break up the form and outline of the beak. There are accent values in the surf at its feet that also draw attention back and away from its sharp point.
  
  
• #2, I pushed this shape up so it overlaps the form behind it, that reduces it's knife edged beakyness, and I also made it low contrast next to the water. The cracks in the rocks are sweeping away from the beaks vector, hopefully again overpowering it's beaky point, and distracting the viewer from that.



• #3, The most distant beak was clustered or paired with the #1 beak. I made them into a single unit, again I downplayed it's value contrast with the water around it. So I could then.....
  
  
• Make #4 a large bright attention getting area that gives the viewer something more assertive inn the area to look at instead of those evil beaks. This is the headliner of this little ensemble, not the beak structures. Again I am calling attention to a different area nearby instead of the beaks, by distraction. This large light area and the light house itself are clustered together as parts of the largest brightest shape in the painting.
  

Something else is going on in this picture too. I have "stacked" all of the receding planes in the rocks back into the picture, at a diagonal starting at #5. This gives me a clear progression back into my painting. This is recession through drawing. Everyone learns about recession through value change, or atmospheric perspective. But often it is a slick trick to establish your recession by bending the drawing a little to tell your visual story. Almost no one ever notices this blatant slicing and dicing, by the way.