A range of articles on all aspects of art composition, including setting out the elements in a painting, choosing a light source, and deciding what to include or exclude in a composition.
Painting Composition Class: A tip to help you decide where to place the elements of a painting.
A gallery of suggestions to alter a painting's composition to strengthen or improve it.
When painting, one decision that must be made at composition stage, is where the light is going to come from as this influences the shadows, contrasts, and colours. So what are the choices?
Simple Step-by-Step Instructions for Making a Viewfinder to Use When Composing a Painting.
Often there's simply so much that's appealing in a scene you want to paint that it's hard to choose what to focus on. Find out how to use a viewfinder to crop the elements to get the best composition.
A simple change in composition can make a huge different in how dynamic a painting is, as these two versions of a painting show.
Why having an odd number of elements in a painting makes for a more dynamic composition than an even number.
Do you paint the background first or last. Find out what other painters do here, and share your own preferences
Using cutouts to decide where to place the elements in a painting.
The Rule of Thirds the easiest compositional rule to follow in a painting.Applying it means you'll never have a painting that's split in half, either vertically or horizontally, nor one with the main focus right in the centre like a bull's-eye.
A common mistake beginner artists make when setting out to paint a still life is to casually set up their props and just start to paint. If you want your still life to be successful, it needs a little more thought that this.
A good introduction to perspective, what it is and how one-, two- and three-point perspective and vanishing points work. Don't be put off that it's on a fantasy art website, the principles apply to all painting.
When you're planning a painting, one of the things to consider is what to include and to leave out. Look at these examples to see how excluding quite a bit makes for a better image.
The greater the difference between the light and dark areas in a painting, the more it catches your attention. This example of tonal contrast may be brief, but it explains the concept very clearly.
