We'll be able to avoid this. We're on the correct course, right?

For sure. No ice age for us! :)

Beautiful!

Thank you!

gosh dangit anthony! YOU SO GOOOD!

Oh, I'm... ok I guess.
:) Thank you!

oh my god your art is incredible....

Thank you so much!

That looks fantastic !

Thank you!

Love that you did this piece in black and white, so brooding and sinister! :0 :)

Okay, sad non-art major here... I know what the golden ratio is, and I know what the golden spiral is. Since you referenced both of them in the description of this painting (which is hauntingly beautiful, by the way), I assume you used them here.

However, I just don't see it. The only thing I could think to measure was the size of the image itself, but 1280 x 691 doesn't work out to the right number.

Can you help me understand?

P.S. Since you are already sharing your beautiful art with us for free, I felt it would be greedy of me to ask a question without giving something in return. I just joined your Patreon as BlueBoxDM (because the Blue Box edition was where I first learned to play D&D, and looking for illustrations to use in my D&D game was how I learned to appreciate fine art like yours).

Hey! Thank you for becoming a patron! It really means a lot!
If you scroll down my posts, you'll find a few that explain it but in short, any size of the canvas can be used and divided based on the golden ratio. Then you place certain elements to align with or fit inside these divisions. Quality compositions can be made randomly or using other methods and schemes but I like this one. Hopefully you end up with something that just looks good, but only after you start measuring, you find out that things aren't exactly random.

Ooh, that is subtle! Looking at this painting again I think I might even see it - maybe. I am not immune to the placebo effect, so maybe I'm just convincing myself that I see a pattern.

Thank you for explaining. And thank you for sharing your beautiful art with us.

You're not supposed to see anything really. After analyzing at least a 100 master paintings, I can kinda tell when I see a golden ratio horizon line, but that's about it. You really notice alignments and proportions after you overlay the golden spiral with division lines on top of the image, but the image on it's own is just supposed to look well composed and natural. It's just saying that if you don't know where to put the focal point, a good bet is the end of the golden spiral, for example.

I just found "Study 23/100" on your Patreon site. Yep, what I'm seeing is just the placebo effect. The reality is far to subtle and complicated for my untrained eye to detect. But at least I understand a little more now. :)

I'm not sure that "placebo" is the right word to use. In fact it's not at all.
Are you thinking of "Apophenia"? Looking for patterns in random information?

Hmm, a few minutes with dictionary.com.... Yep, you are correct.
Well, at least I got the general idea across. :)

Well then no. It's absolutely undeniable that this method was used, in some cases to establish basic elements, and in some paintings, almost every important element lines us... Or if it's all a coincidence in all those paintings, that you can still use this method to recreate those coincidences and create the same quality of composition.