make art...
Learn about 'Art Head Start'
A full treatment of composition is in my Art Head Start ebook and will be presented in much more detail in the online art class I'm developing. It includes collaboration with other students and other social features, study and learning resources, assignments and critiques - and everything else that goes with a quality online course.
This is a summary of the most important elements of image composition. I'll also debunk some myths and over-simplifications. In the online course lessons, we'll cover each image composition element in individually and in detail.
It's about the design of your image. The study of image composition tries to deconstruct and understand the principles of image elements, how they interact and how they affect your viewers.
Please start by reviewing the Wikipedia reference: “Composition - Visual Arts”.
Often the word “composition” is used simply to mean the layout or arrangement of objects in an image. But there's more involved if we look closer.
Composition is part of the larger theory and practice of Visual Communication.
I like to think of art images as having both a soulful/spiritual/creative part and a physical/technical/design part. Although image composition is all about that second part, you can't do the first part well without some competence in composition. That soulful, spiritual, creative part is discussed in later lessons.
Composition can be said to encompass all the physical elements which drive the image as a vehicle for transmitting visual experiences. Think of it as the "mechanics of an image", with an emphasis on layout.
Learning image composition lets you adapt its elements principles and methods to your own personal "art toolkit". This understanding will free you from over-simplified and just plain wrong "rules of composition". Such rules can weaken your artwork and waste your time.
This is not to say that "artistic freedom" means having no rules or limits. Limitations are the very essence of artistic freedom. Without limits, everything is possible - but nothing can be done. Observe below what an artist can do within the severe limits of ink and brush.
Think of yourself in a limitless wilderness. You need a destination, a compass and a map. Those are the "rules" you'll follow. They help you move toward your goal. The real trick is to get your image itself to supply you with a goal, map and compass - instead of imposing ill-fitting foreign rules and methods onto it.
"Among those who study painting, some strive for an elaborate effect and others prefer the simple.
Neither complexity in itself nor simplicity is enough.
Some aim to be deft, others to be laboriously careful.
Neither dexterity nor conscientiousness is enough.
Some set great value on method, while others pride themselves on dispensing with method.
To be without method is deplorable, but to depend entirely on method is worse."
— Lu Ch'ai (Wang Kai) 17th century Master, Chinese brush painting
Composing an image means designing the layout, arrangement, interplay, and so forth, of its elements. But composition is not a mechanical task, like drafting a diagram. And it needs your full attention, because it's critical.
To be successful, your image design must be strong enough to carry a full payload of spirit, feeling and meaning. The soul of your image depends on its body. For example, feelings like harmony/chaos, unity/dispersal, peace/discord are intrinsic in a composition.
Making images means abstracting simplifying and concentrating basic visual elements from your perception of the real world. For instance, in painting a still life picture of a bowl of fruit, you don’t think only of real fruit, real bowls and real table cloths. You think of their 3D geometric shapes, as translated to a 2D surface. You work directly with basic visual elements which only indirectly represent real world objects and their shadows, edges, contours and lighting. Even when making non-figurative images, you still think in terms of the elements of composition.
In other words, you usually simulate and concentrate reality, you don't try to recreate it. Though obvious, this is an important point in this time of striving for "photo-realistic" digital 3D models and 3D scenes. Even in the most realistic images, you're making maps, not territories.
One of the keys to popular success in visual communication is using your image to tell a story. Your main objects will be a cast of players in your image drama - the story tellers of your scene. As the main characters, they need special attention. You should structure your image to emphasize your main objects and their contribution to your story.
When you begin to arrange objects in your image, all the principles, mystique, power (plus myths and misinformation) about image composition come into play.
Composition also means balancing the visual energies of your objects and their relationships - in ways which further your image's communication, please the viewer and control the viewer’s eye path. In other words, image composition is a big part of your attempt to control and optimize the perceptions of the viewer.
Please remember that visual communication doesn't happen on a display screen or a canvas - it happens in the mind of the viewer. You speak - the viewer interprets. And they never see exactly what you do.
Good composition, like beauty, is hard to define but easy to recognize. Because of this, you may run across poor definitions, misinformation or over-simplified and stilted “Rules of Composition”.
With enough practice, good composition will come to you easily and naturally. Then, any rules you still need will be pragmatic, of local context, and temporary. They'll not be zero-tolerance, arbitrary and universal. They'll become rules-of-thumb, not law. Hopefully, they'll come from your images themselves, rather than being imposed from outside.
One important way to develop your skill as a visual composer is to practice seeing - not just looking. This is part of the critical artist's skill I call "Attention". And it's very critical indeed. You must see keenly to sense how a successfully developing image "wants you to compose it". And you also need a strong sense of design to make it so. Besides the importance of seeing your own work clearly, an artist must see with attention in their everyday world and when looking at the artworks of others.
An exercise to help you develop attention in composition is cropping many images. That cliché of the cinematographer walking around framing everything with their hands has a basis in reality - as photographers know very well. For example, you could use two cardboard “L” shapes and a black marker to crop lots of magazine images - as you'll do in one of your assignments.
Another learning method is to practice seeing keenly in your everyday visual environment, and then abstracting objects you see there into basic geometric forms – a sketch book or digital camera helps with this. As I like to tell photographers, "Good photographs are everywhere around you - the trick is seeing them."
By the way, photography is a great way to practice seeing, especially with so many good inexpensive digital cameras available. The importance of going digital is the ability to review your results as immediate feedback, right on the camera's display - while still on-site and able to try again. That is, when you visualize an image and then attempt to manifest it with your camera, your visual learning is enhanced by instant feedback on what worked and what didn't to achieve what you visualized. With a film camera, you must wait for chemical film processing and printing. It's much too easy to believe "Yes, that's exactly what I wanted" hours or days after making your image.
POV is everything.
Where will your viewer be located in your imaginary scene? What direction will they be looking? Will they use unaided vision, binoculars, a wide angle lens, rose colored glasses? If your image is a "window on your world" (not all images are this type), where will you place your window? How big will it be? What shape? Will it be bare or curtained?
Following soon after POV are the issues of framing. Handling the edges and corners of your frame can get tricky. That's partly because the objects and their lighting inside your frame imply objects and light sources "off stage". And it's partly because the frame is an imposed and alien boundary, with which things inside your frame can collide or conflict.
The power objects (the subjects) of your image have to be formed, placed, posed, textured, lighted and properly emphasized to attract the viewer's eye. Even in images about a big scene (like a landscape), not just about a central subject (like a portrait), you often have to insert one or more minor COIs to give the eye a resting place and to enhance meaning.
Image balance is an important driver of emotion in your images. A Static Balance can be calm, restful, introspective - like a summer landscape. A dynamic balance can look aggressive, active, exciting or dangerous, like a battle scene.
You can think of image balance like a see-saw. For static balance, you want to keep it level - by equally balancing the visual force of your image objects against each other.
For a dynamic balance, you need to add visual weight to one end of your see-saw to force a diagonal aspect. Notice that It's not about balance Vs no balance, but rather one kind of balance Vs another kind of balance. Establishing no control over balance rarely works well. The visual weight of your objects can be driven by size, color contrast, lighting, perspective and dramatic effects, like eye contact.
Chiaroscuro is a curious word you don’t hear much outside of art schools or galleries. Even though it sounds like a dilettante's term (good only for cocktail conversations), it's actually a pretty useful term and performs the difficult duty of covering a complex and important concept in one word.
Chiaroscuro means the arrangement and dynamics of the values you see in an image. That is, the interplay of the light and dark areas of your image, without considering hues. It's like looking at a black and white photo of a colored painting. Chiaroscuro is a kind of shorthand for the complexities of image composition; visual balance, centers-of-interest, eye movement and so forth.
Doesn't it make sense to remove parts of your image which don't contribute to its success? I think so. But there are cropping "purists" who think you must use strict standard dimensions for your "window on your world" (see 'Myths' below). If you're producing images for a motion picture screen or TV display, you may be forced to work within a fixed frame. But if you have control of your own frame, you should crop aggressively.
Of course cropping is defined as cutting away any areas along the edges of your image which you don't want. Cropping is necessary for optimized visual communication because the best composition rarely just happens to fit inside some arbitrary frame, such as 8" X 10" (1:1.25 aspect ratio). It would be quite a coincidence if it did. Instead, such arbitrary aspect ratios will almost always include some extraneous visual material which is not helping your image.
My "rule" for cropping is simple and intolerant - "If it doesn't help your image, it has to go." And that includes any area which is only repeating visual information already presented in another part of the image.
This approach of mine is part of my philosophy of freeing your images from arbitrary external rules and instead letting your images themselves determine how to best handle them. So, instead of forcing your images to fit into a prejudged frame, carve away any extraneous image material to reveal your image's own best frame.
I remember once as an art student, I had mounted my class assignment picture onto an overly large sheet of poster board and wanted to cut the poster board down to size, so that it would act as a border around my image. I measured the dimensions of the image and then cut the same number of inches away from each side. But it looked wrong, like I had incorrectly measured! One side border looked obviously wider than the other. So, I measured again and whacked off some more in the same way. By the time I realized that the dynamics of the composition itself were affecting how wide the borders looked, I was almost out of poster board!
The lesson is not to crop with a ruler, but "by eyeball" - at least for images with a strong dynamic balance.
Color effects will be covered in detail in their own lesson. Here, I'll just say that effects such as red advancing and blue receding (color perspective) or color contrast effects, like a hot orange object against a cool green background, are important to your composition - though not considered in chiaroscuro.
Have you noticed how some images invite your eyes to roam and explore from major centers-of-interest to minor ones and back again - with a chance to rest on those centers before exploring again? And have you seen how some images cause your eyes to wander around and around, endlessly looking for something, anything that clarifies the meaning and lets you rest for a minute?
Eye movement shouldn't be accidental, it should be part of your composing. And you nearly always need at least one center-of-interest. But again, beware of "rules of composition", even mine. There are a surprising number of images which work well without any centers-of-interest at all.
Symmetry is a favorite technique of mine for adding power to an image. The basic idea is that when part of an image is "mirrored" (repeated left-to-right or top-to-bottom, or both) our eyes and brains are especially stimulated. That's because a potentially dangerous animal, another human, or an approaching vehicle becomes very symmetrical in our vision as it turns toward us. They become important targets of our attention, so we have a built-in visual warning system to alert us to sudden symmetry.
Eye Contact, coming from a figure in an image, carries visual power in a similar way. These viewer visual reactions are automatic, instantaneous and unconscious. Therefore they're an infallible tool in your composition toolkit.
Visual icons can add additional meaning and emotion to your images. By "visual icons", I mean archetypal or metaphorical image elements which carry a potent payload of cultural meaning or emotion. Symbols like the human skull, atom bomb mushroom cloud, heart shape, etc. These iconic image elements don't have to be visually explicit - they can work at a subconscious level.
Layers of meaning? I'm not yet sure of this idea, but it seems to me that some or most successful images have "visual hooks" which work to invite the casual viewer to take a deeper look and then reward viewers who look deeper with additional levels of meaning. Maybe this can even be done multiple times, with a hook in each layer leading down to another.
I think this works like the advertising method of using a headline to grab one's attention, then a subhead to introduce a story, then a compelling story to sell a product. Perhaps a study of online marketing methods, where serious research is being done into perception and persuasion, would benefit today's artists.
As Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." It's human nature to try to make things as easy to do and to understand as possible. Perhaps that's how silly "rules of composition" get started and survive from generation to generation, like urban legends. Here are some examples.
"Rule of Thirds" - According to this old concept, you should divide your image into thirds horizontally and vertically. Then you should make sure your centers-of-interest occur on one or more of the 4 intersections of those lines. Pretty absurd really.
Long ago, I gathered a set of 20 photos from a collection of official "best photographs". I tried the "Rule of Thirds" on them all. Though I no longer remember the exact number which respected this "Rule of Thirds", it was a small fraction - just as one would expect from random chance. I even allowed a 10% variation from the exact intersecting points.
The "Rule of Thirds" is only a rule if you apply it so loosely that it's hardly a rule at all. Below are some examples I picked at random from recognized past masters of photography.
"The Golden Mean", (also "Golden Ratio", "Golden Rectangle" and the like) is a mythical "perfect" ratio or aspect ratio for a rectangle. The Golden Mean has fascinated mathematicians since the ancient Greeks, but for mostly mathematical, not aesthetic, reasons. Many mystics and several books have given it academic weight over the ages. Therefore, some artists and architects have used the Golden Mean in their work. If you want to look into this hoary presumption, the Wikipedia has quite a lot to say. Personally, I don't get any special sense of perfection from Golden Ratios, so I don't consider them in my own work.
No matter how they are derived, or how long their history, I object to the concept of forcing arbitrary frames onto images. My recommendation is always to let your image itself suggest the optimal composition, such as by careful cropping.
I firmly believe that one of the skills you should develop as a visual artist is the ability to know when an image you are creating attains some "spark of life" or "inspiration". Of course not every image you start will be inspired - far from it. But when you can recognize such a one developing, you'll be able to "get out of its way" and "nurture its nature" toward its full potential - using the kinds of skills we're discussing here. This is the opposite of forcing arbitrary rules onto your work.
Please don't shout, "ITS ALIVE!!!", like Dr. Frankenstein! What I'm getting at is a bit more subtle and less mystical than having your image get up, walk out the door and hitch a ride to the nearest art museum.
Once you have some understanding of composition, you can start to critique images with more valuable statements than the amateur's response of "I like it" or "I don't like it".
You can use your understanding of image composition to give other image workers valuable feedback on how you perceive their work. And, if you can keep your ego under control, you can even critique your own work and speed your artistic growth.
To do this it helps to have some tools for analyzing how the different aspects of composition actually play out in a given image. In an image analysis lesson in this art course, I'll show you how to use an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop to make an artist's use of the principles of composition easy to see.
~ End ~
Wishing you a creative future!
