Magdalena Radziej analysis

Understanding Value and Composition
I picked this piece to analysis for value and what I've done here is break the value scale down into 9 different shades and gone through the piece and numbered them to what I thought they were after carefully observing them. Making sure to check myself, I've realized that value is something we have to spend a good amount of time coordinating to get the right affect. Without the proper value structure our colors begin to look out of wack.

What I noticed was that a lighter value such as the 5 in the background to the right of the image always appears lighter than it actually is because of the values that are arranged around it. This is something I noticed immediately with the whiter values, they appear to be almost white at first glance but actually they are not. What they are instead is 2s and 3s, the painter here never goes back all the way to white, there is always some value which allows him to keep the values under control.

If there was white where the sun light comes in it would push all of our attention downwards to the bottom of the dress instead of at the face like he wants it to be. Or at the very least it would be competing for our attention but instead his lightest lights are found in only a few places and you could say they pass diagonally across the piece. For example notice the touches of a lighter value in the air to her left lead us down to her from the right and we catch the biggest light shapes her arm, face and dress. There are touches of rim light on the ornamentation on the two creatures beside her but theses are still at a level 2 value.

Some other things to notice about value is that he uses the backdrop of the dark values to place the figure, in fact all of the dark values hold the silhouette of our figure. The dark values envelope and give a form to the figure. we also get a really nice transition of blacks from the wing in the background to the headdress that is at a number 9.

The headdress as it faces us has value changes that show the form and the ends point us upwards to her face. Here we know this is the focal point because we can see the variety of value and shapes here. He breaks up the solid black shape with smaller rose shapes that form around her head and encapsulate her face.

We see this in the bust of her as well and we see another repeating element found throughout the piece which is the ellipse that adorns her dress as a chest piece. We see this same elliptical ornament held in her hand, and we see it on the heads of the creatures behind her. These circle shapes can also be found in the globe laying next to her, the roundness of the table end. These round shapes contrast against the straight lines we see in her dress which sits in the center of the piece like a triangle. It moves out in front of her and then to the left receding into the shadow creating a series of leading lines that turn and curve upwards going towards her.

We see similar leading lines from the convergence and angles of the trees behind her on the right side all pointing back towards her. Notice that the reason behind this is balance and variety. The artist wants to create a image that feels balanced on both sides but has variety, so he balances out the dark values that dominate the left side of the image with a series of dark tree limb shapes on a lighter background (a value of 5 or 6). This gives the piece unity and balance while at the same time giving enough variety to make it interesting.

The two creature heads also add to that variety and notice that since the painter is wanting us to look at her and the two creatures he highly simplifys her right side by making it more simplistic and heavy in darker values. The left side feels heavier in a lot of ways compared to the right. Also notice that the two heads of the creature are located at the same height as the points of interest he wants us to look at on our female figure: We see her face and the shape of her bust connects directly with the shadow shapes of the creature to her right. We follow this same shadow shape down to her hand and we see the elliptical wand she holds in her hand, is it a coincidence that this is also the same level that the head of the second demon is located? Of course not. This is economical design.

Check out more of Magdalena Radziej here