The Gift

My sister in law is a tough person to shop for, primarily because she is, and always has been, a person with the capacity to buy herself whatever she desires, unlike myself. So instead of a spending a meager sum on a trinket she wouldn't have much desire to possess, I decided to put brush to canvass. My justification is simple, one thing I have an abundance of, while most (I know) lack, is creativity.
The idea behind the painting was to capture the feeling of an old Victorian-esque reading room. My sister in law is a voracious reader, with a preference for vampire and Gothic fiction. That and her choice of wall decoration in her living-room, a fairly somber colored painting of a beach at night, provoked the idea.
The books are crookedly leaning to elicit an unreality to the picture and to prevent the canvass from being flatly divided in two. That is also why there is a part of a flower close to the crow. Busy and playfull on one side, weathered and somber on the other, but each side having a bit of the other type thing.
Of course like always the picture is sub-par, there is flash-burn at the bottom center. There was literally minutes between me finishing painting the canvass and delivering it to the birthday girl.