TODAY'S FEATURED POST

GHOSTS!

Greg Ruth

Of all the seasonal and year long creatures to be spooked by, for me personally since I was very young and menaced one night by a deranged and nightgown-barefooted granny on our dark neighborhood street, it's always been about the ghosts for me. I'll digest anything on the subject, and have lived 5 years in a certifiably haunted old building in Brooklyn... all of these cornerstones happily in the past. I still adore them as…

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EVERYDAY ORIGINAL

Golden Acorn

YESTERDAY’S POST

Image

Short Take: Foreground Darks

Gregory Manchess

August 6, 2025 - Recently in one of my online classes for SmArt School, a few students were having trouble creating visual interest in their compositions. The pieces lacked depth. The culprit wasn’t the design of the main elements, but the distribution of values. Generally, the students think of the background as dark, but they also wanted to put their main subject in dark clothing, and all the darks in the subject were the same darks as in the background. They initially thought the farther away from the foreground subject, the darker the background becomes. But unless they were depicting someone in a subway, or darkened room, the background can be lighter. What was necessary for them to gain depth and enhance the silhouette of the foreground subject was to slightly lighten the background color value and allow most…

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