Tomorrow is another paint day for my icon. I'm a clumsy painter, so I haven't been looking forward to correcting my latest round of mistakes. Yes, making mistakes is a great way to learn, but sometimes it's more fun just to do something right, you know?
Here, i've borrowed the computer to lay in some composition lines:
Apart from her nose, which is still a bit crooked, Our Lady suffers from a mixing of two design philosophies. My original intent was to follow Renaissance-style layout using a Golden Ratio and a Fibonacci curve. If you squint, you can make out the spiral and the box for that layout. The grid centers on Mary's eye camera right.
I've since learned that Byzantine icons are based on the length of the nose. That's what the circles represent. If that's the case, then Mary's pupils should be placed on the red dots that are in her eyes. By either measurement, her face is too long!
I used Photoshop to gin up a design with corrections built in. Below and to the left is the original face, while to the right I've made some corrections which I will try to lay in tomorrow:
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