Lessons
Lesson Info
Learn Composition
you have all these things, a centred composition, I think this is what I'm gonna do today. This is like you go to the flea market and you buy a beautiful bouquet of flowers and it's right in the middle and you're just like I just want to look at that thing and maybe it has a nice background that's kind of stable. It stays there. There's another term you'll hear a lot called the rule of three. This says when you lay things out, it's a lot, you don't want to be totally balanced, you don't want to just do one here, one there teeter totter if you do things in threes and you put them in thirds. Like say here's a flower base, here's another flower base, here's another flower vase. It just makes for much more pleasing repetitive composition that it will interest your, I can look at it for a little while longer, so that's one centered. There's a rule of three. Another one is if you're doing a landscape, you probably don't want to do this and make a big old point that goes right off the edge of...
your paper because then the viewer's eyes just going to go straight off the edge. A lot of all these compositions things are like how you control how your viewers I travels around your paper. If you're gonna do a landscape, you can do an S curve, you can go like, oh there's a path that meanders and it walks around some trees and it goes over here and there's a mountain. So that's an S curve, not just passed straight up usually. Um another way to keep the viewers, I'm moving around Kind of like the rule of three is to put things in a circle. So you've got some objects. Here's one object, there's another object, there's another object, maybe a few smaller objects and it just lets the viewer hop from place to place, keeps it keeps their I'm moving. So I'm going to call this a triangle or circle, same thing with a focal point. It's like this centered one. You have one big focal point somewhere, this big star, but you can tell them you should also look over here, there's some more little stars and there's some more little stars. You can make a little composition, but you do have a main focal point, you're not just giving your viewer this big old field to look at. There's something called the golden mean you'll see it come up and it's really cool. But basically it's a nautilus shell and it's in a box and if you make a square here and then you make, let's see, it's gonna be like another square here or something. This continuously keeps making a square and a rectangle and a square and rectangle down into infinity and people have studied all kinds of paintings, famous masters and plotted the points on it and it turns out that this nautilus shell, if you lay it over all these famous paintings you get like, oh there's this swirly and then there's there's the first square and here's the second square and it keeps going and it hits all her eyes and her lips and her hands on her shoulders all in exactly the right way and just keeps this mathematical swirly going on. So composition you can you can go simple and you can take it as far as you want to take it. Um But I think for mine I kind of like that vintage look that it's going to be a trophy and I'm gonna put it right centered in the middle. Okay so back to this. Okay. Mhm. Okay so here we go I'm gonna put my dog right there there's a trophy right in the middle. I'm gonna take it down. I'm gonna get some of my sorrel tracing paper. Um this has graphite on one side and paper tissue paper on the other side so your hands are going to get kind of dirty when you mess with it. I usually like to use a piece that's about the size of my art of my tracing but I don't have to it can be smaller I'm gonna tear a little bit of that down so it's just the right size. Mhm. Okay. Yeah Place this on the page where you want it. Yeah yeah yeah put this graphite side down underneath your tracing and then you get your hardest pencil, where is my hair is penciled? There? It is my two H. Is my hardest today A lot of times in my studio I use a super fine ballpoint pen for this but then the ink kind of does gil smudgy and you don't have the option of flipping your paper over. Um So then you just transfer it on follow the lines. Mhm. Exactly what we did to our other drawing, we draw our lines on our trophy, start cleaning everything up where we want it to be. But first I'm gonna put my dog on there, get your dog on there, how you want it. Now my dog's back legs were a little bit lower. So when I was doing my tracing on top of my photograph I actually erased my dogs back legs, drew my dog a little bit more so he I knew he was gonna fit on here and then I came back and I moved my tissue, my tracing paper on the photograph on my ipad so I could get his legs to be up a little bit higher because I wanted to make him look like he was standing on the trophy. It's one of the great things about working with the yeah with the tracing paper is that you can just do part of it and if you want your dog longer or shorter I can show you some examples later of how I've really manipulated the image. Okay so here's my dog. Yeah and I put them on top, trace my dog on there
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase