Dear friends,
Today I wanted to write about composition, especially a technique we used in my digital illustration course. I'm so excited because the class is going to be available again at Corvin Art School. It's a 5 days long program on digital illustration, where we run through character and background illustration and learn about Procreate and Photoshop, textures, and compositions. There are going to be 2 sessions (an offline and an online one) this summer.
You can find all the details HERE
Composition is something we don’t consciously think about usually. I generally draw instinctively and I just put together some drawings. I always thought it was something that rather limits my creativity so I don’t really have to focus on it until I found this method.
It’s a really great technique we use in the course so I thought it's worth sharing. With the help of the method, you don’t have to think too much during drawing and it helped a lot for me and my students as well. In my opinion, it's great in a case, when you have a project and you brainstorm the different options to find out how your compositions should be exactly.
This method comes from a book called Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures by Henry Rankin Poore which was published at the turn of the century.
From early Renaissance paintings, we can already explore that there’s a hidden shape we use to organize the elements. It's usually a really simple shape like a circle, triangle, square, cross, and so on. According to the method, you can apply these shapes in a flat and in a 3d way.
In my exercise, I used this Károly Reich image as an inspiration.
You have to find out what kind of elements you need. In my case a little girl in a kerchief with a basket, mushrooms, and a forest (I didn’t use animals and pin trees)
My task is to create different compositions with these elements with the help of the shapes. Sometimes it was hard to find even one composition with a certain shape, and sometimes it was super easy to create more. Thus I wasn’t really strict about how many I could make. The only important rule was: not to think about it and create as many as possible
The first one is the triangle which in my opinion one of the most common shapes in compositions. So it was kind of easy to find more.
Last one is dots which is not in the original book but I found this shape a really exciting one.
I hope you found this post useful and you will try this technique. Let me know your experiences and opinions about the method.
Sending Love
Ágnes
Some words about me
Hi, I’m Ágnes, a passionate illustrator and animated filmmaker from Hungary.
I'm obsessed with colorful drawings, funny characters, and nature-inspired illustrations. My work fields include editorial illustration, children’s book illustration, brand illustration, animated film, and gifs. Besides commissions, I teach animation and illustration at an art school in Budapest.