You may have mastered paint mixing, application and the basics of perspective and drawing, but if you can’t create a strong composition, your audience won’t give your work more than a passing glance. Your composition should grab the viewer’s attention, create a pleasing design and make your audience want to linger longer over your art.
The more you create, the easier these tips become.
Just remember your first attempts at driving. At first, there were so many things to do and remember that you thought you’d never master driving. Now, you do most things instinctually.
Driving has become second nature. Many things about composition are the same way. Draw and paint a few hundred pieces, and you, too, will develop instinctual insights in creating strong, well thought out compositions.
1. Determine And Isolate Key Components
Consider the placement of the elements of your drawing. Use quick sketches, a viewfinder or a digital camera to aid you. Delete non-essential elements that might detract from the theme or focal point. If you have too many components in your composition, your viewer will become confused, as he doesn’t know where to look for the important elements of the painting.
2. Position The Focal Point Of Your Painting
The main subject of your painting is where you want your viewers to focus their attention. The eye is lead to the focal point by the use of intersections, color modulation and by the basic artistic Rule Of Thirds. Your composition should have a comfortable feel to it. Scrunching things into corners and allowing thing to fall off the edge of the page causes an uneasy tension for the viewer.
3. How Many Elements Make Up Your Composition?
The easiest way to create a pleasing composition is to use the Rule Of Odds. Regardless of your subject matter, using an odd number of elements instantly makes your painting more dynamic. The brain tends to pair up even numbers of subjects. With one element left over, the eye will continue to search for the final pair.
4. Spacing The Elements In A Composition
In nature, it’s uncommon to find things orderly and neat. A variety of spaces between the subjects, the angles at which the objects are viewed and the relative sizes of the individual elements add interest to your composition.
5. Do The Elements Of Your Composition Kiss?
Allowing the edges of two elements to barely meet is sometimes called kissing. This is a rather poor composition error. Objects in a painting should be spaced apart from one another, or they should definitely overlap. A weakly connected shape formed by the kissing objects is disconcerting, as the viewer attempts to understand the relationship of the two elements.
6. Vary The Values In Your Composition
If you’re working from life, paint a thumbnail of your composition in three values, using white, gray and black. Compare the percentage of each value. An easy rule is to use two-thirds, one-third and a touch. This means that you should have two-thirds of one value, one-third of a second value and a small amount of the third value.
If you’re using a digital camera, you can print the image in black and white to see the relative values without the impediment of local color.
7. Choose A Dominate Color Temperature
You should make a concerted decision as to the color temperature of your painting. It may be dominated by warm or cool colors, but one should be predominate. You can have a warm winter scene or a cool tropical scene, but you just need to make the decision.
8. Are The Elements Of Your Composition Unified?
Is your painting telling a story? The elements of your composition should feel like they belong together. If the unity is rather obscure, you can give a sense of harmony by glazing the entire painting with a unifying color.
9. Don’t Stop Painting If Your Strategies Are Obvious
If the first things one notices in your painting are the compositional tricks you’ve used, you’re painting isn’t finished. It’s like a loudly pounding drum keeping time for the melody of a song. You want the essence of the drumbeat, but you don’t want it to overshadow the melody and lyrics.
10. Vary Your Compositional Strategies
If you’re a musical composer, you don’t keep creating variations on a single theme over and over. This same tenet holds true for a painter. If you continually use the same compositional ploys, your work will have a sameness that screams ‘Unoriginal.’
Three ugly words an artist never wants to hear are derivative, clichéd, and hackneyed. Change up your compositional strategies, your subject matter and the size and proportion of your canvases to keep things fresh.
