Van Gogh Final Piece and some thoughts on rhythm and visual cohesion

Hello everyone! Hope everyone is having a great week! I wanted to do a video on this one but I'm not feeling very good right now because of some unfortunate food related decisions this weekend but the show must go on!

So I spent a lot of time messing with this one, first the shading and coloring weren't a match for the quality of the lineart, it looked pretty messy and rough. Also there was little to no cohesion with the style of vincent and the background. Lots of non repeating shapes like the super round but pointy clouds or the smoke shapes. Everything was all over the place. 

Vincent also felt imprisoned and not in a good way since that wasn't the intention and a lot of people weren't getting the sunflower was meant to be the sun so I kept experimenting with smoke once again. 

At first I was insisting on keeping the inner lines since that's kinda my thing when drawing organic stuff but that wasn't workign either since it was completely removing attention from vincent once again. I also wanted to do a blend of the original coloring with all those irregular shapes and crazy colors but that wasnt doing it + the fact that I forgot how I did those xd I really missed that sometimes when you are an ignorant and arrogant human there are no limitations so you do some interesting stuff from time to time. 

After a full ass day of experimenting I decided to remove everything except the abstract shape of the smoke and then mess with colors, however I still wanted a flower on the composition so I added a reference to an often ignored painting of him: The Almond Blossoms. This was his happy flower altough people seem to mostly relate the sunflowers to him. I won't get too deep in Van Gogh's lore because it's quite extensive but also very interesting so I strongly invite you to read his correspondence with Theo, he had a lot of nice stuff to say and a quite unique way of seeing things, but he was mostly an emo. 

The final shade of blue is also a reference to the blossoms but I'm not too happy with it since I do a lot of blue art, it is one of my favorite colors but there's a million more to mess with. But I think the yellow took way too much attention from his head so blue worked much better in the end.

 Fun fact he dind't cut his ear entirely but there's not a lot of proof supporting any of the theories mainly especulation.

Overall I'm pretty happy with what I learned, the improvement over the first one from 2018 and the final piece despite all the dumped ideas. I'd like to leave you with one of my favorite quotes of him: 

"We must not judge God from this world. It’s just a study that didn’t come off. It’s only a master who could make such a blunder."

PS: I'm not part of any religion so when I think of this quote I'm not thinking of the any specific god, just a greater force.