6 EASY Rules for Better Composition and Better Art

hi it's Toby thank you for joining me and today we're doing six ways to choose your focal point six examples of composition in sketching and this is basically what the title is all about your drawing needs a focal point if you think your drawings look flat look boring that is because they need a focal point as a follow-up video to this I'll be doing a video about how to enhance your focal point but this is six ways to choose your focal point so what is way number one we're going to start with the ones that you may well know about and the first one the most common one that we choose is the rule of third so what's that this is our page but we divide it into three we divide it into three again and now we have these crossover points so in our rule of thirds if we transform this into a scene well we use these lines to create key divisions in our in our scene so perhaps at the front we have a little a meadow going across and then we use these dots to Define key parts of the scene so perhaps here we've got a tree which is the key focal point on this side and it's coming down here and it's focused on this dot maybe on this side we have a bird up there and maybe something is mundane as a little seat maybe this is a park so now we have obeyed our rule of thirds splitting it into thirds and popping our key parts of the scene onto those little dots the next one which again many of us would have heard of is called the Golden spiral the Fibonacci spiral and that is a spiral which starts about here on the page and it just swings all the way around and this is the idea of getting this kind of flow through your scene and the tighter the spiral the more detail the more focal that point is in your scene so how might that work in practice well perhaps in this scene what we've got is a little road and on this side we just have one building just looming over and then as it comes around we've got a sort of Street which is in perspective and it looms up and it looms over and here we've got a really big window maybe there's even a person in the window loads of detail going on down here there's also maybe a door and then as we Flow Away we just got a few people and you see how this detail is following this spiral round so that is idea number two the golden spiral all the Fibonacci spiral now onto more sort of Common Sense ideas perhaps but also ideas which really do work so what we've got next is the idea of the L the L shape and here we similar to this we divide our page with one line and another line and you can see this is an L or depending on which way around you do it it's a Packwood cell or whatever but think of it as an L shape and here again we use that L to divide our scene so perhaps this time what we've got is a little Windmill and the windmill is in a big field so this line becomes our field and this line here comes our windmill and we just pop in our little I don't know what they're called turbines windmill arms anyway and you see how this scene is now replicating this shape this L shape and all these wires are just ways of framing your seam to make it more interesting on now to another sort of classic example and this is another letter it's an S an S curve or an S shape and it might be like this or it might be getting bigger at the bottom and this one is great for again the feeling of uh something disappearing into the distance that disappearing thing might be a par for might be a road or it might be a river for the sake of argument today why don't we make it a little little road a little sort of country road going off into the distance along one side we've got a kind of a hedge on this side we've got some little grass and as it curves and curves we lose it over a hill about there and then we've got maybe some little trees and things but the focus is all around this curving s this curving s of whatever it happens to be in this case we decided it's probably a road you could have little details on the on the edge as well but the focus remember all of these things are about the focus not about all the extra bits it's about choosing where to focus your scene now moving slightly away from letters into shapes so this next one you could call the triangle or the pyramid and it looks something like this and this is great for well things which are pyramidal in shape that might be a pyramid literally might literally be a pyramid or it might be let's say a mountain or a volcano so you get your lovely Mountain it doesn't have to be symmetrical but it's the idea of how this mountain is situated into your scene and it's situated there like this triangle and that allows us to focus down on what we're drawing and where we're drawing it by no means least is another really simple way of dividing up our page and this time we just hit with a simple diagonal and this can be straight or sometimes it can be looped getting into a sort of just a lesser form of this and this again this could be anything for the sake of argument this time why do we make this a kind of a forest scene so we've got a kind of big tree which is then going down a path which gets smaller and smaller because it's in perspective so we've got all these trees just lining this long path this long Edge we could have something in the distance here maybe we've got just a little mountain or more Forest but the key the key is that our page is divided by this diagonal and our focus is all along that diagonal with these lovely trees again we could have maybe some people walking along this path maybe there's even a little dog or something in the distance there but the focus is on this lovely diagonal shape and there we are six ways to enhance your focal point if that was fun like And subscribe let me know in the comments what's your favorite way or have I missed your favorite way out you can join me on www.sketchless.com UK for more in-depth courses or on uh my 10 days of sketching course which is completely free and there are links to that down below in the description I'll see you on the next video so thank you everyone for watching my little sketching videos if you enjoy my content please do subscribe to my channel because it makes me really really happy thanks again

Channel: TobySketchLoose - Artist and Urban Sketcher

Views: 65,821

Keywords: urban sketching composition, rules of composition in art, types of composition in art, elements of composition in art, rule of thirds composition in art, basics of composition in art, principles of understanding artistic design and composition, fundamentals of composition in art, principles of composition in art, rules of composition, fibonacci spiral, golden ratio, drawing tutorial, rule of thirds, the rule of thirds

Id: XQrEpYBg0c4

Length: 7min 49sec (469 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023