Lesson - Composition

 

The Secret of Good Composition

By Will Kemp

‘And after drawing comes composition. A well-composed painting is half done’
Pierre Bonnard

Imagine a lovely drawing of a house with a path meandering up to it, trees either side in careful balance, a classic landscape scene that just ‘works’.

Where is this masterpiece? The Tate? The National?

No, stuck to your fridge door, created by a 4-year-old.

As a young child, visual harmony and composition comes naturally.

Children seem to start out with a near perfect sense of composition if you have small children or are lucky enough to have any of your old drawings you created as a child I’m sure you’ll find the same to be true.

Younger children see the edges of the paper as a whole frame to fill, and they often fill them with a great sense of balance

When you start to grow up, you know – really old like 9 or 10, that’s where the drawing problems start. The focus shifts and is aimed away from composition to the pursuit of something far more important, where the accolades are huge and respect even greater, the quest for the ultimate prize …… realism.

A reframing of priorities

The importance that was once placed on the edges of the page, the ‘wholeness’ of the piece are disregarded in favor of singular objects, and the representation of these objects as accurately and as detailed as you can possibly make them.

The prize is no longer for composition, a 10-year-old doesn’t care, the focus is on accuracy and realism especially ‘hard things to draw’ like hands or faces. But the ultimate goal, the real award winner is this….If you can draw a crumpled can of Coke realistically you are king of the art room.

The simplest way to start

Once you have diverted from the path of composition in childhood it is hard to get it back, and you will have a natural tendency to place objects in the centre of a piece, this is due to the strong symbol systems formed in childhood.

Lowry embraced this simplistic quality resulting in his paintings looking childlike.

It is not only through the handling of the paint, but the composition of his painting where everything is biased towards the center. If you want to make the jump towards a more sophisticated composition there are a few things to consider.

Choosing a format, square or rectangle

A format is just another word for shape, and this comes down to personal preference. From squares, rectangle, panoramic. The easiest shape to create a balanced composition is a rectangle, just like an A4 piece of paper.

The rectangular format: this is an absolute classic and extremely flexible format. When a rectangle is displayed with its shorter side across the top it is known as ‘portrait format’ and with its longer side across the top ‘landscape format’.

The square format: This can work extremely well or very badly. You very rarely see a square old master painting. This is because it is harder to balance a painting that has lots of elements within, for example, a collection of figures in a landscape within a square format. It can look awkward very easily. However, using a square format for a more contemporary subject, an abstract or a minimalist seascape, can be very effective.

3 is the magic number

• A composition is about variety just “don’t make any two things the same”

• The “Rule of Thirds” can be key to creating balance in landscape painting

• Make sure the shapes, spaces, and gaps between objects are all different.
  1. The nature of something’s ingredients or constituents; the way in which a whole or mixture is made up.
  2. The action of putting things together; formation or construction.

Composition can be confusing and hard to pin down, you don’t really notice good composition in a painting it is just there, which is why it is one of my 7 principles of painting . The dictionary definition above doesn’t necessarily help us. ‘the action of putting things together‘ well, this is true but the actions of putting things together so they ‘work’ is harder to explain.

If colour mixing is about relationships, the warm to the cool, the bright to the muted then composition is about variety- busy to calm, large and small.

Don’t make any two things the same. If you’ve got a row of fence posts going into the distance – check the gaps, they should all be different.

If you have a simple still life with a jug and some fruit – check the heights, they should all be different, check the width, they should all be different.

This seems very straightforward, and it is. It is just a simple way of analyzing your initial set up. Is this method true for all paintings? No, but the more you look, the more you will notice this to be true.

The rule of thirds

What is the Rule of Thirds?
The rule of thirds is very commonplace in photography. It instantly helps to add tension, balance and interest to your photograph but applies equally to the composition in painting. When creating a landscape composition this is what you do:

1. Divide your page horizontally into 3.
2. Decide whether to have your horizon on the top third or the bottom third (the bottom third is always easier to balance, it helps to make the sky look vast and imposing).
3. Split the vertical into thirds.
4. Align areas of focus at the intersection between the lines.
5. Marvel at your genius