Wheatfield with Reaper and Sun, Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon: Part One

Hellooo, SMW Central! And, man, have I got something for you this time! Yes, van Gogh again— I'm afraid I'll be carrying on like this for a while. The problem is, my list is relatively short (it'll last me 'till just about the end of summer, posting one painting every day), so what I'm going to do is split this paired evaluation up into three parts: one evaluation for the first painting, a second one for the second, and a third one for the two together. That will lengthen your entertainment time a bit, won't it? That is, if you derive any entertainment whatsoever from my rants. Whatever.

Down to business! First, our two lovely paintings by Heer Vincent van Gogh, also part of a series:

Wheatfield with Reaper and Sun

Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon

Although they have faded a bit, we will be using the Wikipedia originals, because of their impeccable quality. Anyways, van Gogh described our painting, "Wheatfield with Reaper and Sun", as "a wheat field, very yellow and very light, perhaps the lightest canvas I have done." Well, some of this we could have gleaned for ourselves, thank you very much H. van Gogh, but all the same he gives some interesting pointers. That bright, pastel yellow, there does seem to be quite a lot of it, doesn't there? Including... the sky. Why? The only time I've seen the sky yellow was during an episode of Doctor Who! Maybe. Well, all it's really there for is to emphasize the total YELLOW of the painting; the yellow grass, the yellow sun, the yellow hills, the yellow... peasant? He did like those peasants. Anyway, the point is, it's there because, well, if you're going to make a painting YELLOW with a capital everything, a blue sky just isn't going to do as well as a yellow one. The sky is bright, and if you're emphasizing a bright color, everything bright had better be that color!

However, we also have those blue mountains in the back. Why blue? Chromatic opposites again! Blue is the opposite of... well, orange, but once again chromatic shift allows us to stuff that blue in there. Perhaps it was purple once; then they would be exact chromatic opposites. But then again, that would make it look like something straight out of a Katherine Lee Bates poem:

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!

Perhaps H. van Gogh was worried about extratemporal plagiarism? But no matter! It is what it is. But still, why blue, besides the whole chromatic opposites dealie? The only time I have ever seen mountains that blue was on the wrong side of the Mexican border. Well, search your inner palettes. What color would YOU have put their? Green is too close to yellow and orange, violet is too far away, and red is too conspicuous! Therefore, the only solution to this is blue, matched to the yellow in its pastel-ness. This, I think, concludes our discussion on colors.

Design! What design can we infer from this? Well, the one thing foremost in the picture is WHEAT. SO MUCH. WHEAT. It coversa very large part of the bottom of the painting, and does a fairly good job of hiding our peasant as well. I imagine that this would be a fun interface screw level mechanic; and, given the negligible amount of colors involved, would do great as a Layer 3 gimmick (but that's not what I'm suggesting Layer 3 for; wait a moment), or as a Layer 2 layer priority thing. Either way, this is fun, screen-obscuring stuff. Behind it, we have a brief stretch of brown ground, serving as something for our character to stand on, obviously Layer 2 stuff, and behind that the yellow hills and blue mountains. I suggest that these both be on Layer 1, alternating each other like the mountains in some of the Chocolate levels in the real game (can't think of a number off the top of my head). Doable, am I correct? And lastly, we have the sun, bright, yellow. What I would do is stick this on Layer three, a perfect circle of reddish yellow, with a one pixel thick ring of orangish yellow directly inside, and the rest of the interior filled in by the pastel we all know and love. This would look great on Layer 3, let me tell you.

That is all on this painting: if you have lots of a color, it dominates everything of its brightness; and its background objects should be its chromatic opposite, with the same saturation; obscuring stuff looks good on Layer 3 or Layer 2 plus priority; and a technique for a Layer 3 sun (which is, incidentally, the name of a hack I'd like to make).

Look forward to the second part of a trilogy!