One SIMPLE Rule for Great Composition
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- čas přidán 18. 05. 2024
- For courses on the fundamentals of oil painting:
/ simplifydrawingandpain...
Composition is probably the most important thing we need to think about when creating a work of Art. For other types of visual Artist, like abstract painters, photographers or graphic designers, it is their primary focus. However, for artists learning to draw and paint from life it is often an afterthought, in favour of the incredibly difficult task of making our work appear life like.
In this oil painting tutorial, representational artist Alex Tzavaras shares one incredibly simple rule for achieving succesful compositions. He talk about some main things you need to consider, but he explains why rules of composition like the rule of thirds, golden ratio and dynamic symmetry, do not hold the secret to great composition. He also shows you a really valuable exercise which will help you to put all of these priciples into practice
Alex Tzavaras is a contemporary realist artist offering portrait painting and alla prima oil painting tutorials. Alex teaches the traditional painting techniques artists used to draw and paint from life up until the start of the 20th century.
To connect with Alex:
/ alex_tzavaras
alextzavaras.com
Your one of my favorite guys to watch on CZcams. Your very informative, educational, detailed, through, and helpful. Keep at it mate! I appreciate you!
Thank you very much Jacob!
The part about having various shapes/triangles is a damm near revelation for me. This video is so well done with it's information Alex!
Thank you! Glad it was helpful.
As i was watching i thought this video is a well planned out composition in itself. Great content and presentation. Thank you
Thank you very much John!
Although there are many compositional grids and methods out there, the rule of thirds is a simple way to understand the basics of composing a picture for a beginner.. afterwards, they can go beyond a basic rule and explore other ways.. So I wouldn't necessarily dismiss it right off the bat
Compose deez nutz
But why thirds? Other than where you place your main center of interest (not in the middle) What about the rest of the image? Compositional grids are only concerned with shapes. There are other factors that need to be considered, colours, value pattern centers of interest and so on. If you ask me, there are already too many videos that just focus on the rule of thirds and grids etc. and not enough talking about all the other things people need to think about.
@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting I think the main focus with thirds might be that it helps prevent any section from having an overwhelming weight
It seems much more often used concerning horizon lines and placement of people rather than an exclusive composition type. It probably got most popular just for being easy to relay and having dramatic improvement for beginners who’s instinct is to center everything. But once you already know it, seems there’s diminishing returns if it’s the only one you use
My theory anyways
@@ObsessedwithZelda2 I reckon photographers have made it popular?
@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting You see, there is a big misunderstanding in the compositional organization. We usually learn and explore how to obtain the ”center of interest” by general positioning inside the format, and color contrast with the background, without knowing how direction and sense affect the background. Usually, we conceive the background just as a void around the object.
The rule of thirds evokes the most simple constructive assemble that gives us the most basic attentive dynamic cases of a VISUAL FORM. It consists of a colinear success of three constructive components of surfaces: 1/ content-limit-content; 2/ content-content-content; and 3/ limit-content-limit. The last case is not quite a FORM, but rather just a proposal. They correspond to the colinear and symmetrized succession of morphological components: BACKGROUND-OBJECT-BACKGROUND, with the embossing of the OBJECT.
I am painting the cabbage right now. I would love to see more of your still life demos. Out of all the still lifes I have seen, yours are the softest and most ethereal.
thank you very much Suzanne!
glad that i came across and went through the whole video..
I'm glad you did too! Hope it was helpful.
Fantastic, I’m so happy you are here! 😊
Thank you! Me too.
Thank you Alex, as usual very helpful information.
Thanks!
Thank you for this! It’s a good synopsis of composition!
Thank you! Glad you think so. This took me ages to write and summarise everything.
Thank you! Another valuable lesson we need to learn!❤❤❤
Thank you Frances! Glad it was helpful.
Thank you. That's really helpful. I will experiment with using that rule on my next still life paintings.
Thanks Ian. Glad you think so. I've found this rule so helpful. Particularly for landscape painting too, when you have to think really quickly.
Thank you Alex! As always, I learned a great amount from this video. As you imply, taking the mundane and making it beautiful is a valuable skill in itself. All the best!
Thank you Louis!
I find the 'sausage' in the brown bag a little confusing. Another object or composition would have prevented that. Do like the use of the paletknife.
Thank you Alex! I really enjoy your videos!
Thank you Sally! Glad you like them!
Wow. That’s. A beautiful painting
Thank you! Glad you like it.
Thank you, Alex:)
Thank you
Thanks for doing this video, it’s good to get a different perspective than just the ‘rule of thirds’ because there are so many fantastic paintings/pictures that don’t subscribe to that formula and yet work well as a composition. As with your other content this is really informative and practical, and is the type of advice which is incredibly helpful for student/developing artists, self included , and thanks again for sharing your experience
Thank you so much ! This is so helpful keep going
Thank you! Will do!
exciting video alex like it
Thank you Kaj!
Ok, I'll start still life tomorrow!
Well done!
Thanks, Alex for revealing your points about composition! It is a very important topic that must accompany the entire practice of any artist working in an abstract or representational field. Making white and black thumbnails is fundamental to simplify color information and have access to nonchromatic information: direction, distance, and sense, or dynamics of a static image.
There are infinite possibilities for shaping surfaces on a plane and mobile support, but there is only one way to unify them according to the visual attention of the working viewer. Geometric rules of sectioning don't help us make dynamic decisions. We relate our visual and lucrative experience to a special type of topology - based on visual-attentive principles. This is a dynamic-implied topology. His neural support is located at the cortical level (especially V5). This is why composition is so hard to explain because the visual information is highly synthesized and with various cortical distributions.
The present theory of Bauhaus solves the dynamic problems of composition by using structural elements. The problem is that Kandinsky suggests them as lucrative and constructive primitives without any attentive resolution in the visual context. Any constructed convex surface or deconstructed portion of a concave surface is an elementary-shaped surface according to his dynamic compositional context. This is not an interpretation. The content of any surface is defined not only by color but also by the dynamic category of his compositional context. I develop this on my site: structuralvisualartresearch.
Alex, I hope not to bother with the reference. Your presentations, techniques, and principles are always an inspiration to me.
Off to the shops to buy a cabbage
I have a few books on composition. They are all great books, highly rated on art websites, and I enjoy reading them. I struggle to get my head around some of the content though……..until now! That totally made sense to me. Fantastic video👍🏻
Thank you very much! Glad it was helpful.
Feeling enspired after watching, good job. Gonna set up a still life table of my own
Excellent! That's exactly why I made this video.
Salamat po
Very fascinating. It is like tool box that I really want to explore. It amusing me that there is a negative comment. It does not surprise me now! Yeah really exciting stuff that makes me want to paint more and more over to really explore putting things together in ways I find interesting. I am about a year into painting and I am selling portraits here and there but it is exciting to think about how to compose a painting that I want to produce to express something I see and interesting. Again Thank you so much for the work you put into this. Excellent job!
Well done!
I think it is very helpful to have over-lapping objects to unify a composition.
Definitely, particularly to create the appearance of depth. I probably should have mentioned that in theis video, but then there are many other things I could also have spoken about and made this a much longer video? The main thing is just to get students to start thinking about it more and to paint more still lives!
Composition is not about sticking objects to compositional grid points like is commonly told to beginners, is about creating a space with guided visual traveling, objects fitting some compositional grids is a consequence of this mindset, not the cause.
I think the rule of thirds is an approximation of dividing the image by the golden ratio. When your subject isn't thin as a line, it's close enough. How much there actually is behind the golden ratio, you decide.
I think artists have got to do the work and experiment to find designs that they really resonate with them. I'm sure it's possible to create following the golden ratio or not. There are succesful paintings where the main center of interest is right in the middle of the painting.
What on earth is that thing on the right of the painting ??!!??
Purple sprouting broccoli. I agree, from that angle isn't very obvious what it is. But I chose it for the purple colour and from the other way round, which looks more like broccoli, it's green.
I've commented. Looks like a floppy man's **** in a paperback.
@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting I think they were talking about the dong slithering out of the bag of chips
Two potatoes lol
Yup, the shape he chose for those potatoes makes them look like a big fleshy penis. He either didn’t notice (I don’t know how) or it’s on purpose. (I don’t know why)
The rule of thirds is a crutch. It works, but I'd rather not need it.
must ask do you like van gogh
I'm not really into him, but out of the three, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne I probably like him the most? His portraits are really good.
always nice to talk to you alex agree with you@@SIMPLIFYDrawingandPainting
What a load of horseshit.
it must be really sad being you
Oh dear, Mr. Charles Miser is throwing a tantrum