Composition in Action

Today I’m going to take two photos and apply some of the principles of composition. Sometimes, we luck into a beautifully composed image, but more often, we have to gently shift things around, create more unity with the color scheme, cleanup uninteresting details, etc. For this post, I’m using Photoshop to show you what’s going on in my mind, but normally a lot of this stuff I have to do on the fly or with a notan (more on that later). The goal is to pick the photos apart, assess which I want to paint, and make note of any alterations I think will be necessary to improve the final product.

First Photo-

Here’s a quick shot I took in the Sebastopol wine country. It was late, and no one was out on these country roads, so we briefly stopped for me to get this photo. I painted a different version of this scene in the recent 1-day Exploring Greens workshop… partly because this photo has issues! LOL. But we can carve something out of this that’s interesting just the same.

I love that golden late afternoon light!! The subject works because the light in the center is bright and vibrant while also being surrounded by darker, greyer shapes. It tells a story too- about late afternoon in the vineyard, with that peaceful light sifting through the trees. Nothing to do… Out with friends and family… It’s a good story, right? But there are all sorts of compositional issues. It’s centered like a donut, in the middle of the photo, and the yellow light is really only in that one area, rather than integrated a bit more into the whole composition. The composition could help us instead of hinder us, make us want to walk into that world for longer.

First, let’s go through a sequence of crops and expansions. Definitely don’t let a photo dictate things! It’s just a moment in time that happened to get captured by your camera lens. It’s not, in my opinion, more “true” than what you create with a painting- a camera distorts and selects just like anything else.

So, cropping is a simple, powerful tool everyone can use. It’s always the first step in composition, one of the easiest ways to liberate yourself from your own photos, and something I’m often trying to get students to practice. With cropping, you remove what’s extraneous, and help rearrange the essentials to be dominant. And for that to really work, you need to know what your focal point is. Lots of good stuff is packed inside the process of shifting around your ratios!

here i remove the old foreground, and slightly move that gold area to the left. I’d like to move it more, but there’s no more photo to the right!

I’ve added a piece of another photo. I don’t usually do this, but I want to show my thinking process. Normally, I just add it in my mind.

now the Focal point is off center (using Active Balance), and there are good leading lines with the trunks and branches (Paths of transit!)

Next, I add in a little more golden light on the right-hand side. I’m actually inspired by another photo I took that same day. Again, this is the sort of stuff I think about or can make clear with a notan, but for this demo I’ll show you a representation.

Here’s the photo I used for inspiration…

and here’s the final product from my original photo.

We end up with a very paintable subject. Now we have Active Balance involved (because of shifting it off center), we have Paths of Transit (diagonal leading lines with the trunks), and we’ve used Integrate or Separate (because we sprinkled that golden glow into more spaces, tying it all together). This is definitely something that novice painters can learn to do, and is just the sort of stuff I am leading students to in class.

Compare the two versions-

Second Photo-

Here’s another photo, from a local walking path in Vallejo. Of course, I like the story here, about strolling in the morning sunshine, and also the sense of distance and the leading lines guiding us down to the road. Paths are very powerful compositional tools. But there are still issues to figure out, for sure. Let’s start with a series of crops and expansions.

The original photo. Its nice, but there’s a lot of unneeded space on the left that takes the focus away from the path.

i crop it and make it a vertical. it’s better, but I miss those little sky-holes in the trees on the left. They helped balance value-shapes with the sky.

I decide to integrate them in the final composition, using the princicles of “Active BAlance” and “integrate or Separate”. Now the composition isn’t so one sided. My eye has something to hold on to on the left.

here we see the balance of the new light shapes. Note too how active the broken edge of the foliage is. This helps us more easily move through the image, from tree to sky and back again to tree.

And here we see the value of paths of transit- lots of diagonals and leading lines, helping us circle through the composition and come back to the ground plane and focal point.

The final goal is to have a focal point that’s off center and dynamic, with a compelling (yet natural looking!) integration of light and dark shapes. To my eye, this new arrangement achieves that.

Making a Notan-

Now that we have a basic photo composition in order, it’s time to make a notan. Notans (Japanese for “dark-light”) are a powerful simplification and preparation tool. Everything gets reduced to integrated black or white shapes. No grey at all. Yin and Yang.

Even the yin-yang symbol uses “integrate or separate.” imagine how less powerful a symbol it would be without those essential two dots.

So, it’s not the same as a value-study (which is also very useful, just different). Like the neck of an hourglass, we funnel all the values down to black or white, and then, when we paint, we slowly re-complicate things, and open the hourglass back up… but always with these simplified value-relationships in mind.

My sketches are about 5” x 7” or so. Smaller is completely reasonable, but I wouldn’t go any bigger.

I start by mocking up the biggest shapes

Then I start to fill things in, left to right

when I’m done, everything is essentially only a mass- black or white. my aim is to not use lines to separate shapes, but rather to press white shape against dark shape.

I use a Pentel brush pen (you can find them cheap on Amazon) for notans. First, because I like using them. :) It’s fun, and they make very diverse marks!! But also because brush pens like this keep you thinking in masses of value, not in lines, like a pen or pencil is prone to doing.

It’s always a process of back and forth. I use white gouache, straight from the tube with a thirsty brush, to dive back in and reclaim white. It’s exploratory. Not a finished product in and of itself.

some whites go in…

some white go away.

It’s tough at first. It takes practice for students to get a command of, but it can be a revelation in terms of how you think about composition. This is something I’m excited to bring into the expanded curriculum of the 5-week intensive in a full-throated way. It’s the mental foundation for so much else. We’ll be getting introduced to notans literally on day 1, and then get to practice making them as part of the ongoing instruction. Even if you’re not taking the class, repetition and exploration are the best learning tools. It’s how you discover what works best for you and get it into your motor memory.

Waiting List and Live Demo-

Tomorrow (Sunday, 9/2) I’ll be doing a live zoom demo. I’ll be starting at 9 am PST and running until around 11 am PST.

How do we take this black and white notan, that’s passed through the simplifying funnel of the hourglass, and apply color? How will I let the notan guide me? What does it teach us about the subject? Come tomorrow to find out! :)

Here’s the link you’ll need-

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82986661148?pwd=M0NTcHpkUHNiTGlMRm1vTkZubkpEQT09

If you’ve been following along and are interested in taking my 5-week intensive, there’s still time to sign up for the Wait List and get the opportunity to enroll 24 hours before I release the class to the public. Enrollment opens to the public on Monday morning, 10/3, but I’ll send out the special URL to folks on the Wait List on Sunday morning (10/2), even before I do the demo. Space is limited for the class. If you’d like to find out more about the class and to sign up for the list, here’s a link to the blog post I wrote that’s all about it. Scroll down to the bottom and sign up to get on the wait list!

http://www.seamlessexpression.com/blog/2022/9/14/get-ready-for-my-new-5-week-class-in-octobe