Dance like nobody is watching

I wanted to capture an interesting moment in the midst of hum-drum of normal life. In the quest for such an inspiration, I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled pinterest so much until I stumbled upon a picture of a man dancing dreamily as if lost in his own world. Oh the whimsy! So I painted it.

So I have a lot of thoughts around it. The one thing which is bugging me the most is how awkward the background looks. I didn't know what was the exact issue but somebody on reddit pointed out that the background looks flat. And I can't help but agree. This is an active struggle in all my paintings currently - I'm not able to represent the objects further from the focal point of my painting satisfactorily. And I'm not sure how to improve this. Second, even though I color picked the hell out of the reference pic, the lighting on the face is too dark. This made my realise it is okay to not match colors with the reference pixel by pixel - fewer values in small areas are better than too many shades overlapping each other.

Oh by the way, I learned a new art term - "values" which represents the light/dark on a color. You will see me showing off my knowledge a lot. It is so exciting to find words for long convoluted phrases I write as explanations.

I also tried a variation of the same painting which was not that hard and looked alright. I don't know what this style is called but I have seen it a lot as logo designs, etc. I set this as my phone wallpaper for the longest time. I liked the hairstyle in this one much more than the original painting.

I really need to stop getting bored by my own work though. By the time I reach completion of my paintings, I'm already over them. This means that I skip doing the last touch-ups and corrections required once you have the bigger picture ready. I need to stop labelling my work as complete after I complete the painting the first time. There's always some work remaining like adding shadows or highlights. I am always in a hurry to post my art online and hunger for the likes and online validation which is not helping. Retrospection is good for self improvement.