Learn To Draw #07 - Compositional Guidelines

hey folks brandon shaffer here and i have a white board in front of me here and i just want to plan out or explain rather some simple compositional rules and guidelines for you guys it may be repetitive for some people that follow me on the painting but i just i had to add this into the drawing because it's really important so let's get started alright so one of the first things you want to realize is the rule of thirds so imagine if this is your sheet of paper or your canvas or whatever you're working on you want to divide it into thirds using imaginary lines so wherever you would fold it to make it into thirds just think about folding the paper don't actually do it just these are imaginary lines in your head so now it's divided into thirds and you also want to divide it into thirds horizontally so there you go that's the rule of thirds now what does this do well it gives you now where the points where the lines intersect so they intersect here here here and here those are called points of interest now that's where you want generally that's where you want your composition to have interest for example let's say you're doing um you know you're painting a tree on a landscape so you could have the you know the land be down here or right on the third wherever you want it and now it comes to the the point of interest is the tree you know that's the focal point of the of the piece is going to be the tree somebody without knowledge of the rule of thirds they may put the tree right here now that can be fine you know there's a little tree okay no big deal but it's not that interesting um you know it can be a nice composition maybe if the lands going down you know it'll be a triangular composition now that's something different but this is really too simple so what can you do to make it more interesting well let's get rid of this tree and maybe just slide it over onto a third a line of thirds and put the tree here you know reaching up or wherever it's going to be you know maybe it's reaching out this way you know whatever kind of tree now that is way more appealing it's kind of has this it gives it kind of a balance and you know maybe you can have hills off in the distance and have the peak coming up over on this third so that the eye kind of has this it has this flow um so that's the very very basic simple rule of thirds is that you just want the interest to be on these points and another thing you can do actually what i just showed you here is to have the interest be on one point over here and then diagonally have another point of interest something going on in this general area you know this general area so that there's this this dynamic between them so i kind of just showed that here so let's get rid of this and now that we know the rule of thirds you know it could be for anything it makes it even even if you're doing photography is where it really comes in handy i took a photo of a flower once that was sitting on my jeans and what i did i could have the flower dead center you know it was kind of one of these flowers now this is just really quick drawing folks let's say you just have a flower just the top of it no stem or anything now you could have a dead center like that but is that really appealing not really so what we want to do is move this flower maybe scale it down a little bit and we can put it right here have the center of that flower be on that point of interest and then you know that's a lot more appealing to have it move down somewhere it kind of it forces the eye to just flow that way it just has these flowing lines um you know when it's dead center it's kind of just bland but see now you have room for all this this other whatever you want um you know it could be anything you could have another flower up here and then one up here or something so you have this triangular kind of movement i mean endless possibilities i just want to show you guys the rule of thirds that it doesn't always follow that but look at a lot of artwork also another example and it's usually used let's change the orientation here to a portrait and not a landscape if we have a portrait of a person now usually if you look at the old portraits of like presidents and other famous people they're usually dead center or off to the side just a little bit now you can have the person's shoulders coming like this here's the neck and the head's going to be up here well one thing you should look for that you'll notice in all of these portraits is that the eye line is almost always on this third so their eyes are always just about on the third it's very interesting now they can be dead center so sometimes you have to break the rules you can break the rules but it's good to know the guidelines and you know because sometimes they're off to the on this third and then the eyes are on this third but the thing with portraits is the head the point of interest the focal point is on a third whether it's this third or this third so that that's what i want you guys to realize you know so just look at old paintings and drawings and see how people use this look at artists that inspire you and see how they use composition and just break down their shapes you know some compositions are like this it's a triangular composition there's a lot of old classical paintings that have that it's all this tension and it's just it builds up you know there's a bunch of people over here and then there's like clouds or you know whatever the scene is you know a cliff um but they use this triangular kind of composition to leave the eye somewhere so that can be really interesting also another one other shape you can look for is kind of this s kind of curve in many different forms many different ways it just kind of you know gets the eye flowing back there could be mountains up here in the back and then like a trail leading down you know a bunch of trees or another hill mountain and it's just kind of this snaking uh kind of thing you know so there's i mean you can do there's so much to do with that so i just encourage you to look at some photographs look at paintings and drawings and and break down the composition you know if someone does a tree you know just break down their simple shape like okay there's a tree there and then they did mountains back here and clouds up here and maybe it's not the best composition maybe it is what what what makes it appealing to you figure out what it is and then incorporate that into your own work so you know maybe they put an object on this third and then they have the mountains you know the horizon line was right on this third so maybe you should try doing that you know try making your horizon line on directly on a third or directly split in half which way is more appealing uh you know it's something to play around with and to figure out what makes an image appealing that's really one of the biggest questions you want to ask yourself when you're drawing or painting and when you're learning to draw is that once you get the technical aspect down of sketching and drawing and you know drawing spheres and figuring everything out once you get all these technical abilities down you know shading all this stuff is to start asking yourself what makes an image look appealing you know this is right on a third right on the third and and break it down cop compositionally and to start learning those guidelines and start learning what is appealing to you and what is appealing to the masses and what you want your artwork to look like so i hope this video was helpful i'm not going to go into too much more bore you to death but hopefully you understand the rule of thirds you know look into it some more and check out some older artwork and see how they use the rule of thirds see how they used composition see how they use darks and lights and shading and shadows and um you know the best time of day to draw or paint is usually early in the morning or in the evening when the shadows are really long um things like that just dissect paintings and drawings and then incorporate it into your own work i've said it so many times but if you're new if you're just now getting to this series um you know that was a little little bit of composition there so if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up if you'd appreciate it anyway thank you for watching take care of yourself peace

Channel: SchaeferArt

Views: 636,096

Keywords: brandon schaefer, acrylic painting lessons, acrylic tips, tricks, help, demo, tutorial, learn to paint easy quick, art, drawing basics, compositional basics, learn composition

Id: GX9tJShYmeU

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2014