totally stoned

“I picked up a pencil/tablet/brush”

Arthur Trevethin Nowell, 1887 - Captives

Honestly where do I start? The movement? The composition? The lighting?

Look how much more it seems like she's leaning forward because the tree and the man curve away and around her? Like Tantalos who reached for fruit but the tree would bend away from him? That's what this feels like. And then there are these other two, pulling her away into the opposite direction. So there's a lot of movement! But what makes it even better is how he still stabilized the image with a lot of hidden vertical lines!

Also the contrasts? Fantastic! Like the one between the metal of his armor and her flowly dress or her light face vs the other faces kept in darkness or the light foreground vs the dark background,...

Also the edges are amazing! Everyone tells you corners are not important but here? Wrong! Her foot is like an anchor that stop the eye from falling out of the image so it's a lot more rendered than the flower petals.

And don't even get me started on the rendering...

The reason why it doesn't look like they're senselessly pulling at her? Because the action is actually built up like a spiral, whoa! There's a lot going on behind her back, but because of the spiral your eyes don't linger there and instead are lead towards her body and then towards her head.

It's not just the spiral, though, there's another line of movement hidden in those hands:

And not only that, they're grouped together in the shape of a pentagon! Simple shapes are easy to recognize, so it tells your eye where to go immediately.