Making of Necklace

I would like to provide some background information about how this portrait was done. Maybe somebody will find this interesting. Move the mouse over the image to see help lines.

I had an idea of a portrait with a shoulders building a half circle. (blue line).

So I asked her to move her shoulders to each other. At the same moment I saw she has bend her back. That looked very nice together with her arm, so I asked her to move a little bit in one or another direction until I’ve got the green line. The pose is really weird (she said after that: “I thought I looked like a hook”), but I think because of this green line, the pose looks pretty harmonically.

Just before we tried different body poses. I saw that the composition was a bit unstable so i decided to put something on the left side. There is actually a little prehistory on this. One sunday morning, two or three weeks before this picture was made, I just played a little bit with a still life. Nothing special, I just tried this and that. (I believe still life is a best training on the composition – you have all the time of the world. No lame excuses! :-))

One of the pictures I’ve done was this one:

I didn’t liked it, but thought that could be a nice completion for a portrait someday. As I saw the problem with a composition I recall that failed still life and recreated it on her left side (marked with red). The missing necklace matched perfectly to her dress!

The nice detail I like on this image is her finger (marked yellow). Hm… I don’t know is it my own interpretation, but I think it brings a nice movement detail to this very static picture.

Your thoughts and opinions are very welcome!