Urban Watercolours - Section 2. About learning good Composition
A good Photos for your painting reference is one that you take yourself.
This photographer has a point of view both in composition and temperature.
He has a particular mood, we can call this mood, filter, or temperature as well. It’s all the same in that mood, filters and temperature are a point of view. A signature of sorts. When you use existing photos, the photos has already been given a point of view, and it’s never your point of view because we’re all unique.
How do we plan a composition using our photos, taken with our phone camera?
This is the focus for the next two weeks.
Turn your own photos into a series of compositional studies.
Rule of thirds is a basic rule to be aware of but you don’t have to follow it strictly either.
I took this photo with my phone in New Zealand, and that figure is my husband.
2. Simplifying complex scene into our composition
- Reducing visual noise. The camera takes ‘everything’ and our job as the artist is to take what works best for the purpose of our paintings, and sometimes that can mean the image itself is just a blue print, a starting point, not an image to copy exactly.
Scale: How big are something versus something else.
Planning a painting:
This takes a lot of guts and a lot of repetition. Thumbnails are low investment and high returns in that it helps you see scale quickly, it shows you how off you are in your measurements and makes adjusting easier.
Examples by artist Zhu Hong.
PROJECT 3. COMPOSITIONAL STUDIES
Compositional studies is fun when you can limit to one or two tools but the tools can give you all spectrum of values. A pencil can give you a 1 to 5 in values. And a pen may push your spectrum further a 6-10 or can be seen as another colour. If you use black, it give your darkest dark an extra boost, but it can also tend to flatten your work if you use it too much, or use too much as outlines.
Think of your spectrums like a singing voice, sometimes you want to whisper, and sometimes you want to shout. A Good Compositions requires a variety of both soft and loud. How do you find your unique harmony and balance?
Let us look at this challenge as another limited palette.
In the world of pencils and pen, there are a lot of thought distortions. Some pencils and pens are so boring to think about using, yet how much have you explored? Let us double down today and see if we can find new perspectives.
Exercises around the campus with your phone camera. And then back to your paper with just pencil and pen.
Here are some ideas:
Angles & Composition
Take photos from many different angles. Exhaust your options.
Composition Instinct
Delete the ones your instinct says NO! Keep the ones you like, and the ones you’re not sure about.
Do not edit the photograph, edit in your thumbnail sketches, why? Because this will help you when you’re on location to rely on your instinct of what to keep and what to ignore.
Distance & Scale
Note that distance between you and the subject will determine the scale of your subject/objects and therefore where you stand or take the photos from matters.
We’re not professional photographer, our phone cameras can help us frame and flatten, but it also can help us learn how to scale and compose our drawings and painting