A word about composition

Composition will probably make or break your paintings. It's a hard fact but if you place the objects in your scene in a way that doesn't provoke interest in your viewer then the picture will appear boring and will not hold their attention. This applies no matter how good your painting technique may be. It needn't be the case however, as good composition can be acheived with just a little knowledge and some forethought. There are two standard approaches to composition. The grand-daddy of them all is the Golden Section. This compositional aid has been on the go for centuries, but as it involves fairly complicated arithmetic (at least for me!) I'll quickly pass on to the other method, which is the 'thirds' technique.

Here you can see we have taken our page and using two vertical and two horizontal lines, we have divided the page up into thirds. Having done this we can now already see potential for our compositions. We have two possibilities for our horizon - high and low (depending on whether you want alot of sky or a lot of land) - neither of which will sit awkwardly on the half way point of our page. You'll also notice that we have four intersections of horizontal and vertical lines. Here is where we can position our main subject matter.

You can see from this quick doodle the major elements of the composition follow the rule of thirds. The tree foliage takes up the main focus as it sits right over an intersection and has it's trunk follow the vertical line down to another intersection. We've also got the horizon following the top horizontal line.

Obviously, in a real painting situation you won't worry about positioning your elements 'exactly' on these guide lines. You'll also, doubtless, have other elements to place too. But if you use this as a 'guide' for placing your main objects of interest and main compositional elements - like the horizon, or shoreline, etc., your paintings will have a good balance about them. The advantage to following this method is that it avoids your composition falling into certain pitfalls, e.g. symetrical layouts, where you have objects of equal weight on either side of your page, centred objects, objects falling off the edge of the page. I'll come back to composition at another time, but I hope this helps you get those paintings looking interesting and well balanced.