Composition #10

July 13,  2013

Cropping

When my son was a baby I took a class in photography and one thing I remember the teacher saying is.... get your photo set up, then take one big step closer.  Most books on composition mention cropping.  I use my view finder for this.  I have a couple.  I'll included photos.  The one you make is basically two "L" shapes pieces that you can adjust so easily for size.  

The idea is to close in on your subject, simplify, and think about big shapes.  The value viewer works for this, too.  

There are a lot of good examples of compositions that are well cropped on pinterest and Daily Paintworks.  Carol Marine's ArtByte has some great examples.  I'll include one of of my own.  

This helps frame and crop the subject you want to paint in a landscape or a still life set-up.

These can be adjusted to any dimension, I like them both, but the second one you can make yourself.

This is a 6 x 6 of mine where I did some serious cropping as a part of planning this composition. 

Daily Paintworks  

Composition # 8

July 11, 2011

Our internet had a breakdown so I've not been able to add any posts for a few days.  I'm still studying composition and could probably keep doing that for quite awhile.  What got me going on this was my own frustration in doing a painting a day and keeping them interesting and worthwhile.  I realized that I needed to do more planning for each one.  I've been consistently adding to the Daily Paintworks Website and reached 180 paintings listed.  My goal is 250 for the year.   I was happy with the one I did yesterday.  

6 x 6 - Available at Daily Paintworks

The composition for this one was about having the darks create an armature and a gestural path into the painting.  This time I used the VALUE FINDER app from my iPhone to see the pattern that the darks created.  It is a really valuable tool in looking at the pattern of lights and darks.  I think it was worth the $4.99 that I spent.  You take a photo of your set-up and the value finder creates a number of different value patterns.  The most helpful to me is the NOTAN, a pure black and white version of your photo.  

The Art Tutorials at the Daily Paintworks are also worth investigating.  Carol Marine does a really good one on composition.  She recommends a book called The Simple Secret to Better Painting.

Here's a link to the tutorials:

Daily Paintworks Tutorials