Thinking About Composition

My good friend Brad Silberberg is an accomplished nature photographer.  He often shares photos with me to use as reference photos for artworks.  The beautiful thing about Brad's photos -- aside from his sensitivity to the plants and animals around him -- is that the photographs are already well composed.  All I have to do is sketch, draw, or paint them.

Except for making practice sketches, when we artists set out to create a drawing or a painting, our first step is to compose the scene.  We lay out the elements of the painting in a way that is pleasing to us & draws the viewer's eye in.

When we use classical composition, we divide the painting into thirds vertically and horizontally.  Our eyes are naturally drawn to the places where the lines cross. Notice how John Singer Sargent used this knowledge to make a strong composition in his painting, Crashed Aeroplane (1918).

Graphic from the Virtual Instructor: https://thevirtualinstructor.com/blog/the-rule-of-thirds-in-art

Below you can see the painting without the lines and feel the impact of Sargent's composition. Do you notice your eyes traveling back and forth between the people working and the crashed plane?  Does it make you ask questions about the story behind the painting?

When using classical composition, the artist places important parts of the painting either on one of the 1/3 lines or where the lines cross, as Paul Cezanne did in his Self Portrait (1875) below.

Graphic from The Virtual Instructor: https://thevirtualinstructor.com/blog/the-rule-of-thirds-in-art

Notice how Cezanne's eyes, the windows to his soul, are placed on the top 1/3 line.  Here's the painting without the lines.

When a figure is included in a drawing or painting, it's also important to give their eyes space to look within the composition.  Below is John Singer Sargent's painting, "Paul Helleu Sketching with his Wife" (1889).

Notice how each person has space to look ahead within the painting.

Graphic from Draw Paint Academy: https://drawpaintacademy.com/understanding-composition-for-artists/

The same approach works for birds like this American Crow.  It feels more comfortable because the bird has space to the right to gaze and move into.  

It also feels like the crow is curiously studying us!

Look at the way the water ripples and light reflections highlight the elegant curve of the swan's neck below.

I love the radiating lines created by the twigs in this photo of a male American Bluebird. The diagonals catch our eye and keep it moving within the photo.

The clouds radiating from the bottom right of this landscape up to the top left create another beautiful diagonal element.  Notice how the horizon line isn't dead center of the photograph, but down on the bottom third. 

Sometimes a creature like this mayfly is more at home upside-down.  Do your eyes travel up the arc of the mayfly's body and over to the insect's eye?  Another inviting composition!

In a portrait -- whether of a human or of a horse like Bella below-- the eyes are the most important part of the composition.  I find my gaze is drawn up to Bella's head by the broad diagonal lines in her neck, and her eye is right at the intersection of a horizontal and a vertical 1/3 line.

Does your eye travel around within the photo above?  That's a sign of a good composition!

You don't have to precisely follow the rule of thirds.  It's okay to create a composition that you personally find pleasing.  Looking through a viewfinder -- your phone's camera, or a simple rectangle cut out of a piece of cardstock  -- is a great way to compose a scene in nature before you draw it.  

The trick with composition is to think about it before you create a finished drawing or painting. A few minutes of planning will result in greater satisfaction with your final work.

Many thanks to photographer Brad Silberberg for all of the nature photographs shown in this post!

Weekly Planner: Fun with Gouache!

I love fall!  The colors, the cool, crisp weather, and the abundance of nuts, veggies, and fruits.  I let that delight spill over into my weekly planner as I reused gouache from a painting project.  

What do you love?  What inspires you? Can you funnel that delight into your art?  Working in a sketchbook or simple planner as I've done here lowers the stakes and encourages experiments.

Happy Creating!

Nature Journaling: Autumn Leaf Study in Gouache

An autumn walk can turn up a wealth of colorful fallen leaves.  I find myself returning from each hike with a handful of beauty.  This particular maple leaf, with its red, green and yellow splotches seemed the perfect subject for a gouache painting.

Gouache is much like watercolor, but it's opaque, so you can paint contrasting colors over one another, and light colors over darker ones.

I began this painting with an ink sketch of the leaf in my nature journal. I chose tubes of colors to match and began painting the larger swaths of red, painting them in. As I painted, I noticed the nuanced darker and lighter red areas, and added them. (Paints used = Quinacridone Rose, Quinacridone Red and Alizarin Crimson.)

Finally, I got down to all the detailed veins, spots and blobs of different colors. (Chrome Yellow Hue, Sap Green, & Burnt Umber. The shadow colors used were Ultramarine Blue & Alizarin Crimson.)

I love details! The places an insect chewed the leaf, the spots where the green contrasts brightly against the red, and the lovely little veins that show through catch my attention and delight me.

Here's the final leaf painting.  I especially love working from life -- the leaf -- rather than a photograph of the leaf.  There's something compelling about nature in the present moment.  Though I take loads of photos, I'm far more likely to sketch and paint actual natural treasures in front of me.

What do you love to look at?  Have you ever sketched it? You could record the details about your favorite things that make them special to you with a simple sketch -- or two, or more!

Happy Creating!

Autumn Colors with Watercolors

The beauty of fall can make an artist feel like a race is on -- to paint all the colorful scenes we can under the blue sky. I started this painting with a hike to see the landscape and to pick a scene to paint.  The view above caught my eye above all the others.

I started this painting with a pencil sketch, then added ink lines with a Micron waterproof pen, and started painting the Phthalo blue sky.

Working from light to dark, larger shapes to smaller details, the process of capturing the day's colors began.

Colors used: 

Azo yellow mixed with a touch of permanent rose for the yellow-orange foliage, 

Phthalo blue mixed with burnt Sienna for the deep green trees in shade, 

Azo yellow mixed with Phthalo blue and a touch of permanent rose for the green grass.

Burnt Sienna mixed with a touch of permanent rose for the reddish grasses in the foreground and the distant cows.

Sitting outside painting in the landscape lets an artist immerse themselves in the fleeting beauty of nature's fall colors.  What initially felt like a race to capture colors becomes a meditation on what is happening right now in nature and a beautiful way to experience the season.

I hope you get time to slow down, sit in nature, and experience the season.

Happy Creating! 

Autumn Nature Journal: Painting Leaves

This is the time of year I find myself stopping in my tracks on my daily walks to pick up an acorn or an especially gorgeous leaf.  I can't help myself!

Back in my studio, I choose a treasure or two to sketch.  This particular day, I found a lovely Cottonwood leaf and an acorn. Painting the crimson colors around the yellow veins in the leaf was tricky.  It became a sort of meditation, and all else left my mind.

 I used a new set of watercolors, a Winsor & Newton Cotman Watercolour sketcher's set.  I wanted to get aquainted with mixing these colors before I use them in an upcoming watercolor class I'm teaching.

I added a shadow to the leaf, a few comments in the margins about little details I noticed, and the page is done.

I love painting and sketching little bits of nature, and delight in the way they can tell the story of a season as well as a larger scene.

Autumn Nature Journal

I traveled recently to a wedding, and had a few hours of time before the ceremony. I took my nature journal for a stroll around the hotel grounds.  

The hotel was bordered by an undeveloped meadow with old orchard trees, creating space for an impressive array of native wildflowers -- from familiar goldenrods and white clover to Virginia Mountain Mint, an icy, peppermint-scented plant that makes me feel as though I've been swept away to the Arctic wilderness when I smell it.

Here's the list of plants I found:

wild strawberries

coneflowers( Rudbeckia)

Dogwood red osier?

Goldenrod

St. John's wort

Wild dogbane

Shaggy mane mushroom

Queen Anne's Lace

Mountain mint

Horse Gentian (honeysuckle family)

White clover

Cottonwood

Pear trees

crabapple trees

apple trees

Liatris?

Thistle

Wild grape

Privet

Red oak

New england aster

Willow

I sketched as I went, and found a windblown cottonwood twig with golden leaves to take back to our hotel room and draw.

There's nothing so grounding to me as drawing plants. I notice as many details as I can and sketch them in.  The dance between using two or three different shades of yellow colored pencils to create the hues to match the cottonwood leaves feels a little like a workout.  When it's done, there's a quiet satisfaction that rises up.

Now when I look back, I see little reminders of our time away from home.  I feel grateful to the wildflowers, trees, and geese for making me feel connected to nature. 

Sketching an Autumn Scene

A crisp Autumn day dawned clear and lovely, and I set out to capture a bit of the season's color with my paintbrush.  

I started with a pencil sketch and then painted a wet-in-wet sky using Phthalo blue and French Ultramarine Blue.

After the sky dried, I mixed pyrrol red and Azo yellow to create the orange hues of the sassafras foliage.  I laid in a wash of sap green muted with a touch of alizarin crimson.

I got lost in laying in the greenery along the fenceline (foreground) and in the midground hill.  I used Hooker's green muted with alizarin crimson for the field beyond the fenceline trees.

Finally, I mixed French Ultramarine blue with burnt umber to create a dark gray for the tree trunks and limbs. Yellow ochre muted with burnt umber created the dried grasses.  After the wash was dry, I added in grass stalks in burnt Sienna.

I used the same tree branch gray, lightened for the shadows.  Here's a look at my palette at the end of painting this scene.

This is a great time of year for color!  Even finding a single, vivid leaf or other nature treasure invites sketching, painting and nature journaling time. 

I hope you get a chance soon to record the vibrancy of Autumn in your sketchbook or nature journal.

Happy Creating!