Composition: Principles & Secrets

1. Introduction: Welcome to oil painting with Steve Simon. In this class, we'll be exploring the realm of composition, and more specifically, how to improve your designs by using sacred geometry. As artists, we tend to choose to paint things that are simply pleasing to our eyes. Makes sense, right? We might see something visually inspiring and jump right into painting it just as it is. Sometimes we might even feel like we shouldn't alter real life because doing so would somehow be dishonest. After all, a landscape is sacred the way it is, right? A portrait must accurately depict the person's actual face. I still life must convincingly represent the fruit, flowers or whatever. But we also realize we can pose, arrange, or illuminate our subject in a way that subjectively pleases us. And so we set about trying to capture the landscape in certain pleasing light or pose the model in that elusive, flattering posture or arrange and rearrange distill life until it feels good. This intuitive approach is how most of us start our journeys as composers. The next step, however, in improving our compositional chops is by adding analytical means to our design process to more efficiently and objectively achieve engaging compositions. The great masters didn't only use intuition when composing masterpieces, they supported their creative ideas with proven analytical techniques. So in this class, I'll be focusing on these analytical tools. First, we will walk through the various elements of design. These are the composer's tools. Then we will examine the principles of design. These are the ways in which we use the tools for the desired compositional effect. Then in our project, we'll focus our attention on a handful of these principles and employ the assistance of secret geometry to enhance the results. Thank you for your interest in exploring composition with me, and I'll see you in class. 2. Elements & Principles of Design: So what is composition exactly? The term composition is derived from the Latin componere which means to put together. In visual art, composition refers to how elements of design are organized according to principles of design. So we have elements and principles. Let me explain what that means by way of some examples. First, what are the elements of design? The elements of design are, firstly, line, pretty straightforward. Shape, also pretty straightforward, simply areas defined by edges, form, similar to shape, but adding the suggestion of a third dimension. And there's space, which again, is similar to form, but space can be positive or negative. Then there's hue and saturation. Here we're alluding to the color family like red, green, blue, whatever, and how intense or neutral that hue is. Then there's value that is how dark or light an area is, and then finally texture or surface qualities that create tectile illusions. So those are the elements of design. What then are the principles of design? Principles are the ways in which we use these elements to create the desired effect. In other words, how we compose. Some principles include, firstly, shape and proportion. Here, shape is not just geometric but rather associative. How do I use basic shapes like ovals, triangles, and lines to produce a believable face, for example, or render one in a way that makes a desired point. And how do I size these elements for the desired effects? And there's balance and harmony. Going all the way back to 1941, the famous landscape artist Edgar Payne wrote the definitive trees on this entitled Composition of Outdoor Painting. Although Payne in his book focuses on landscape art, his principles are largely universal. In the book, he introduces dozens of balanced and harmonious patterns for composition. I highly recommend taking a look. In fact, you can download his book for free in the download section. Then there's arrangement, which is closely associated with balance and harmony. This will be the focus of our project, so much more on this later. And there's path or direction followed by the viewers I, which is also very important principle of art. This, too, we will be exploring in our projects, again, more on this later. And there's negative space, which allows our designs to breathe. It also is a necessary ingredient in balance and harmony, as well as creating the illusion of depth. Then we have rhythm. This refers to the sense of dynamic flow. And as the name suggests, hints at a kind of musicality to our work. And there's repetition, which as a principle of art refers to the use of repeating lines or patterns. It can be used very effectively to impart a sense of energy in a prevailing direction. Then there is perspective, which of course is the idea of creating illusion the illusion of depth. Then there's color. Color has a myriad of compositional uses such as creating mood, tension, or unity. You can also make elements stand out or blend in. Then we have contrast, which plays a huge part in composition, maybe the biggest of all. It's particularly evident in style of art called Kiaroscuru clear and light in Italian. Here, we use stark differences in value to create interesting designs. Artists use no tens and value patterns as tools to evaluate the impact of contrast on their compositions. A no tan is a concept borrowed from Japanese art. In Japanese, no tan refers to dark balance. In its strict form, a no ten uses only black and white. This, for example, is a no tan representing this painting. Creating a note ten during the composing stage of a painting gives us an idea of how our future painting will read and lends us the opportunity to improve upon our design before we have too much invested in it. The concept of a value pattern is the same as a note ten except we allow for more values than simply black and white. We'll be using a value pattern in our project. Then there's finally illumination or lighting, which is obviously related to contrast, but with some subtle differences. Here, it's more about the quality of the light we're talking about, including temperature and mood. Contragur, for example, meaning against the day in French, is a style of illumination where the subject is backlet as the viewer looks against the light. This is often used to give paintings an ethereal or spiritual quality. And then one more actually. Lastly, when I call intentional unconventional. This is the idea of breaking the rules as a means of drawing attention, eliciting an emotional response, or expressing ideas abstractly. So that's a lot to digest in terms of how elements and principles of design impact composition. In the next video, we will undertake our project and explore some of these principles. We will particularly be focusing on the principles of arrangement and the path followed by the viewer's eye. What's even more exciting, we're going to be using sacred geometry, the sacred geometry of the golden ratio and the Fibonacci spiral as tools to guide us. In the project, I will also be using Photoshop to help compose. But don't worry if you don't have access to Photoshop. You can just follow along and glean the same lessons. 3. Sacred Geometry: Let's begin by taking a look at the sacred geometry of the golden ratio and Fibonacci spiral. So if we create a line we call AC and then try to place a point B on this line such that AC is to AB, as AB is to BC, you will have discovered the golden ratio, and that number is 1.618. Alternately, we can express the ratio of AB to AC as 0.618. Or more practically speaking, we can say that according to the golden ratio, point B is about 62% across line AC, and this is the number we're going to be using as we compose our painting. This golden ratio is found on faces, fingers. And throughout nature, even including the structure of DNA, the golden ratio also shares an interesting relationship with the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. When the numbers in this sequence get sufficiently large, the ratio of two successive numbers will be 1.618. The same number as the ratio of the golden mean. And it gets crazier. If we tile squares whose side lengths are successive Fibonacci numbers, we get a grid that looks like this. If we then draw quarter circles from corner to corner in each of the squares, we get the Fibonacci spiral. And once again, this pattern shows up throughout nature from the smallest seashells to the largest galaxies. In fact, the golden ratio and the Fibonacci spiral show up so much in the world around us that we barely even notice they're there. They hide in plain sight. In other words, we don't even notice them until they're absent. It's when they're absent that things begin to feel a little bit off out of kilter in disharmony. This is why architects, designers and artists going all the way back to at least ancient Greece have used this sacred geometry to create a sense of balance and harmony. So now let's see if we can do the same. 4. Project Part 1 - Compose: Welcome to the project for this class where we'll be going through a step by step process of creating a composition from multiple photos. You can download the three source image files from the Download resources section located under the Projects and Resources tab for this class. When you've completed the project, please upload an image of your composition to the My Project section also located under the project and resources tab of this class. In this project, I'll be using Photoshop to compose. If you have Photoshop and would like to follow along, great, if you don't have Photoshop, don't worry, you will still glean the same composition lessons by simply watching, or you might prefer to draw the composition by hand. A second bonus project follows this video featuring a demo in which I will paint our composition Alla Prima. If you choose to paint with me, again, please upload your project. This gives other students the opportunity to learn from your experiences and gives me the opportunity to offer any feedback you might be seeking. Okay, we're going to work on creating an engaging composition from these two source images, and a third one we'll reference later. Now, recall our principles of design, we're going to focus on these four, balance and harmony, arrangement, path of the viewer's eye, and contrast. Now, we're not going to ignore the other principles, somewhat by default, we'll also be considering shape and proportion, negative space, color, and illumination. But these four are the ones we'll focus on. To assist us in addressing these principles, we're going to use the sacred geometry of the golden ratio and the Fibonacci spiral. As you might have guessed, we're going to borrow elements from both of these source images. And as you may have also guessed, we're going to borrow the flowers from this one on the left. Which are much more interesting than the flowers on the right, but we are going to borrow the leaves, the pot, and this cutting board that we're going to turn into a round table. We're going to borrow those elements from the image on the right. We're also going to use this background on the left. So these are going to become three separate layers. In other words, the flowers over here are going to be a layer. The background is going to be a layer, and then the leaves pot, and table from this image on the right, are going to be another layer, and we're going to mash these together and use the Fibonacci spiral, we're going to change the orientation of these flowers to follow a little bit more of a Fibonacci spiral, and we're going to place elements according to the golden ratio and see what we come up with. Okay, let's start by creating our layers. We're going to use the magic wan and choose select subject. And then we're going to add the table. Then we're going to inverse all of this. We're trying to create a background layer here. So we're going to copy that and create a new document with the same size and then paste the background. So that's going to be our background layer. We're gonna go back to our image. And deselect everything that's not the left flour. There we go. And now we can copy that and drop that in place as a new layer. Once again, go back to our original image, hit Command Z, that'll bring our old selection back. And now we're going to go about deselecting everything that's not the right flowers, copy that. Again, go back to our new image and or a new file and drop that in place. So we've got three layers now. Now we're going to go to our second file over here, our second source image and choose the leads pot and table from it. We're going to copy that and then drop that in as another layer over here. For clarity's sake, I've renamed all these layers. There's the background, leaves pot and table, the left flowers, and the right flowers. And now we're going to come up here and get rid of one of these images by consolidating the layers. I'll enable us to just focus on our composition. And we're going to hide all the layers except the background, and we're going to work on cleaning up the background. We're gonna use the magic eraser tool. This does a surprisingly good job of just kind of filling in the background, AI at work here. So we're going to use that and then I'm going to use the smudge tool to further kind of clean it up and give it the idea of some painterly brushstrokes. And now we have a filled in background. Then I'm going to bring back the visibility on each of these layers and clean them up a little bit. There we go. Next thing we're going to do is to place the flower pot in the horizontal according to the golden mean. So in other words, 62% of the way across. Or image is 3,000 pixels wide, so 62% of that is 18 60, so we're going to drop a vertical guide at exactly 18 60. And what we find is the pot is actually pretty close to properly positioned already. So we're going to just kind of tweak that a little bit, get it nice and exact. Next thing we're going to do is bring in our Fibonacci spiral for guidance. I've brought in this PNG file with a transparent background of a Fibonacci spiral, and we're now going to work on tweaking these flowers on the left to follow this arc, this fibonacci spiral as best we can. So to do that, we're just going to use our transform tools of rotating and magnifying and, of course, repositioning these flowers in an effort, again, just to get it to follow to get these flowers to follow that fibonacci spiral. Okay, that feels like progress. But what I'm starting to notice is a lot of dead space in the center of my composition here. So to rectify that, we're going to start magnifying some elements, and we're going to start with the leaves pot and table right here. And we'll scale that up. But as we do that, of course, as we're scaling up this layer, we notice that our pot is moving to the left slightly, and we had placed that according to the golden ratio before. So now we're going to have to bring back that guide and reposition our pot so that it is lined up with our guide for the golden ratio. Little extra tweak. Now you notice something very interesting. Almost by accident, this leaf is starting to come very close to tracing our fibonacci arc. So I'm going to use my Lasso tool and select that leaf. And then we're going to come up and choose transform warp. I will give us this grid. And then we can tweak the vertices of this grid to make that leaf follow our fibonacci spiral a little bit more exactly. So far, we've scaled up the bottom part of our composition. Now we're going to do the same thing to the flowers. We'll start with the flowers on the left. And then the flowers on the right, and just kind of fine tune things as needed. I'm going to use the warp function again to place the stem in a position that makes a little bit more sense. So since this project is all about composing according to the golden ratio, maybe we can use that golden ratio somewhere else. And I'm taking a look at this table here. What if we tried to make that table 62% of the horizontal dimension? Let me show you what I mean by that. So before we calculated that 62% of the horizontal 3,000 pixels is 18 60. So I'm going to make an ellipse that's 18 60 pixels wide, and then I'm going to put it in position and see if we can make our table follow that ellipse. To do that, we're going to select a table working together with our magic wand and Lasso tool. And then we'll scale and reposition according to the guide that we've created with our ellipse. Similar to the manner in which we created our different layers at the beginning, we're going to create a different layer now for the table and also use the magic eraser tool to fill in that void area in the table. As I take a step back now and evaluate the composition, I feel like it can be improved upon if we move the table over to the left slightly to give the whole thing a little more balance, and then to take all the elements of the composition and bring them down a little bit, as well. I think these tweaks will just help the overall balance. Next thing I want to do is to create a center of interest using the golden ratio. I have already created that guide that's 62% across the canvas, and now I'm going to create another guide that's 62% of the way up my canvas. So using the golden ratio in both directions, we're going to get an intersection of those two lines, and it's at that point we're going to drop our center of interest in. I've pulled up this image from my photo shoot, and I particularly like this one flower here. I have selected it using the magic wand and Lasso tool, and now we're going to copy it into our composition. I've worked on the center of interest a little more, enlarged it, and rotated it, put it in place, made it feel a bit more natural. So things are starting to look pretty good in terms of where all our elements are. Now what we'd like to work on is the lighting. I'd like to make that a little bit more dynamic, and that's going to affect our values or what we refer to as our value pattern. Now, when it comes to composition, artists will often tell you that color gets all the credit, but value does all the work. In other words, how light and dark elements are in your composition can dramatically affect your overall composition. So to discern value, a great tool to use is just our ability to squint. So if you squint at this image, at some point, you'll start to see common values start to sort of blend together, and you'll get an idea of what your value pattern looks like. We can also use Photoshop to give us an idea of what that looks like. We're going to go into mode, gray scale, it's going to give us all kinds of dire warnings. Don't worry about that. We're going to be able to control Z out of this. And we're going to go into the filter gallery and choose cut out. And let's go up to five levels. Command zero to give you a full image. And this is going to give you an idea of what our value pattern looks like. So you can definitely see our Fibonacci spiral coming into play. But I think and certainly our center of interest starts to pop, but we can really work with this sma to improve upon that composition. So that's where we're going to be after next. First thing we want to do is make our focal point pop, so we'll go ahead and select the focal point layer, and then we're going to create an adjustment layer. We're going to use curves. And what I want to do is amp up the contrast on this one. So what we're going to do is kind of tweak our curves, kind of go back to curves and hit Option Command G so that our adjustment layer is just altering the focal point layer. So if we play around at this, we can get the shadows a little darker and the highlights a little lighter. So maximum contrast in our focal point area. And the reason we'd like to use an adjustment layer instead of just altering this layer is it's not destructive. I can go back in here and take out that adjustment layer, you can see if I click off the eyeball, or I can go back in and change this. So this might be something we refer back to as we get deeper into this. I think I'm going to work on the layer that I've been calling right flowers, and I want this area in particular to recede back into the background a little more. So in other words, I want these darker values. So we're going to go into right flowers, adjustment layer. And again, we're going to go into curves, and on a Mac, it's Option Command G to just isolate that layer. And so I want this to be darker, so we're going to drag it down, something like this. And we can change that. And it's this area that I want to remain light, right? That's part of our Tibonaci spiral. So I can go into the mask right there, make sure you're on black, and I'm going to use my brush. And this area that I don't want affected, I'm just going to paint. So this area where I still want the light to hit. In other words not to be affected by what we're doing up here, I can mask off. And once I've done that, I can still play around with my curves, and it'll only affect the area that's not masked off. So, something like that. If you do your little squint test, you can see your value pattern starting to come in to focus a little bit. Next, I'm going to play around with the left flowers, and again, we'll create an adjustment layer and work with the curves on this layer and see what we come up with. That feels pretty good right there. Next, we're going to work on the table. So again, an adjustment layer, and again, curves. And this time, I'm going to play around a little bit with the Fibonacci spiral again. So let's bring that back into play. Back down to our curves. Um, you're going to make this darker. I do want this to recede a little bit back into my background, but I also want to bring in this Fibonacci spiral into play. So we're gonna click on the mask, make sure we have paint brush selected and black. And then we're going to go in and mask off this area so it's not affected by the curves. It's like that. So that area is gonna be a little bit more lit up. Get rid of the spiral and then take a look at that. Pretty cool. I like that. Next, we're gonna work on the leaves in the pot. Ken, a chesut layer. And again, curbs. Isolate it to that layer. And here, again, we're going to be after cloth kind of contrast. I want these highlights, especially out on this edge to pop. This is part of our spiral. And I want the darks to remain dark and maybe get a little darker. So come down to our mask can paintbrush, black, mask off this. Keep that. I like the little highlights that are kissing this area, so I'm going to keep those. And then some of these darks should remain dark. A little more interesting contrast. Now, I don't want it to affect the pot. We're gonna tackle that separately. So we're gonna make another adjustment layer for the pot. Again, curves. And in the interest of time, we'll just fast forward through this a little bit. In this last step, I'm going to apply an adjustment layer to the background and choose color balance this time, and then just kind of play around at the color balance levels until I have something that feels just about right to me. Now if we return to our value pattern, you can see a marked difference, right? There's our Fibonacci spiral. Everything's properly in place. Can back out of this. And we can also take a look at where we came from. So there's our composition and the two source images that we drew upon, this being sort of the original composition and borrowing elements from this one to the right, and coming up with a substantially more dynamic and interesting composition that we're ready to paint. I 5. Project Part 2 - Paint: Welcome to the second part of the project. In the first part of the project, we use these two source images, Photoshop and sacred Geometry to design this composition. Next, we're going to paint this composition la prima. To get started, please download these two files from the Download Resources section, located under the project and resources tab for this class. When you've completed this part of the project, please upload an image of your painting to the My project section also located under the project and resources tab of this class. This gives other students the opportunity to learn from your experiences and gives me the opportunity to offer any feedback you might be seeking. Okay, we're ready to paint our composition. I'm working on a linen panel. And I'm going to start by just toning the canvas. Then we're going to bring back our grid on our reference image and measure off that same grid on our canvas. I'm just using the paintbrush essentially as an eraser here. Now with the help of my grid, I can start drawing in my composition by negatively painting in the flowers. In other words, pulling off paint from the canvas, again, using my brush as an eraser. To do this, I need to repeatedly wipe the brush off on a paper towel. At this stage, I'm primarily interested in the shape and form of things and only secondarily interested in the value or how light and dark each of these elements are. C tips can also be effective at pulling paint up. And for larger areas, you can also use a paper towel. And we'll finish up the drawing with our table. For this painting, I'm going to be using zinc white, cadmium yellow medium, Alizarin crimson, French ultramarine, Vidian and burnt sienna. I like to keep the palette fairly limited. It helps maintain color harmony throughout the work. I'll start by adding some of the darker values and then massing in the background. Not trying to exactly match the background colors, but I do like the idea of the cooler greens to the right, upper right, and then the warmer greens to the center and left. In general, I like to work from back to front. So next we'll start working on the table using mostly burnt sienna in this area, and we are painting Ala Prima here, so I'm not going to get too hung up in the details, but we're going to establish the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights and then add a little bit of texture, a little wood grain to the table. When painting prima, I prefer to use squared off brushes, so brights and flats. And the aim is to be as efficient as you can with brush strokes. So in other words, to try to minimize the amount of rework that you're doing or going back over things. So it's a kind of paint it and forget it kind of mentality. In this composition, the shadows are quite cool. They're being influenced by a secondary blue light. And then the highlights are quite warm. They're being illuminated by a warm yellow light. So here, I'm painting the pot according to those differences in temperature. And of course, these differences in value and temperature will be evident throughout the flower part of the orchid, as well. Cool shadows and warm highlights and using the interplay to create form. Alla Prima, in Italian means at the first. So in the spirit of alla prima painting, we are to do this complete painting in just one sitting. Most Aprima painters, however, will let a painting dry and then go ahead and add some details after the piece has dried, and that's what I'm doing here. So to recap where we've been, we started with these two photographic images as source material. Then we use Photoshop to mash them together and applied sacred geometry to create this composition. And finally, painted the composition in Alaprima Thanks for watching this class to the end, and don't forget to upload your painting to the My Project section located under the Project and resources tab. Thanks again and happy painting.