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The DRAWING HANDBOOK

Dover Publications, Inc.

Composition

About Composition

Unity and Variety in Composition

Drawing Orientation

Dividing the Drawing Space

Triangular Division

The Golden Section Division

Examples from Master Artists

Balance

Eye Movement and S Curves

About Composition

There is no single formula for creating well-composed drawings, just as there is no one technique for drawing realistic-looking trees, rocks, or other landscape elements. Awareness of the principles that are covered in this chapter, however, will make you more sensitive to the ways the space on your sheet or canvas can be divided. The application of some of the methods discussed will contribute to better composition in your work. Technique improvement will continue to come as you draw more and more.

Among other things, composition concerns the divisions of space on your pad or canvas and where in these divisions you place your key forms, your center of interest, and the more significant compositional elements. Placement is not everything, however; the tonal relationship among these elements is of equal importance and is part of what makes a composition "work."

Any subject matter contains essential, subordinate (less important), and irrelevant features. As an artist you must be concerned with the way placement and tone are used to emphasize the essential and subordinate elements in your rendition of the subject. Irrelevant elements should be eliminated so as not to distract the viewer from the true message of your rendering. Your artistic judgment is called upon when you're deciding whether an element is relevant to your message. For instance, do you keep or eliminate the television antenna on a farmhouse in a landscape? The answer depends on what you are trying to say. Of course, if your message is about the spoiling by careless persons of the rustic beauty of the land, then you include the television antennas, burger wrappers, used tires, and pop cans. If your message is about the beauty of the scene, then you eliminate those elements. With regard to your picture, you are God! You represent your little universe as you want it to be.

Unity and Variety in Composition

In order to please most critical eyes, a picture (drawing or painting) should have both unity and variety. If a picture is without unity, the viewer gets the impression of a disorganized muddle. If a picture is without variety, the viewer can quickly become bored as his or her eyes scan the picture.

If it has unity, a work's elements all just seem to "hang together," related, yet with appropriate significance or subordination of particular elements. Unity is achieved by proper choice of tone, subtle use of line (edges of forms), and overlap of picture elements, among other devices.

Variety is necessary to minimize boredom as the work is being viewed. A pleasing distribution of shapes on the canvas is essential to variety.

Drawing Orientation

Your paper or canvas may be oriented, or positioned, in many different ways. If it is square, it may be oriented upright, or it may be placed in a diamond orientation with opposite corners at the top and the bottom. It may be round or oval; if it is oval, it may be oriented with the long axis vertical or horizontal. Most drawings and paintings are rectangular or square. A vertically oriented rectangle is called a portrait orientation, and a horizontal rectangle is called a landscape orientation (see figure 1-1). Obviously, portrait orientation is not limited to portraits, nor is landscape orientation only for use with landscapes. These are simply names to differentiate between the two orientations of the paper or canvas.

There are some standard sizes used for paper, canvases, and frames, although any size or proportion can be used. (The use of a nonstandard size, however, generally means making or buying a custom-size frame.) The relative proportions of some of the smaller standard sizes are shown in figure 1-2: 3" X 5", 5" X 7", 8" X 10", 9" X 12", 11" X 14".

Dividing the Drawing Space

There are many mechanisms you can use to divide your picture area. The primary goal is to get variety into the arrangement of the space and thereby create interest for the viewer. Any mechanism or scheme that does this for you is valid. There is no one way that is "proper." In fact, there are several ways to pleasingly divide the drawing space and determine key locations for important elements in your composition.

Also shown in figure 1-2 is one of the possible ways to divide the surface of a rectangular space—by the use of a square. Although these illustrations show landscape orientations, the same ideas apply to the portrait orientation. The square that starts the space division can be based on either of the two shorter sides of the paper. Use of either the left-hand square or the right-hand one gives an unequal division of the picture space, and unequal areas in your picture enhance interest. For example, if your landscape contains a prominent tree or other key figure, a good placement for it (although by no means the only good placement for it) is somewhere on the vertical line formed by one of the squares. This would put the figure off center, which is generally a good idea. The use of the squares is just one of several ways of locating appropriate off-center places, key locations for key elements in your composition.

Triangular Division

The off-center placement of the key element of a picture was not always considered the only proper placement. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was frequently considered appropriate to place the central figure in a key location along the vertical centerline of the canvas. Often the central figure was placed more toward the top of the canvas with less important figures below in a triangular arrangement, sometimes in conjunction with a circle, square, or both (see figures 1-3 and 1-4). The triangular key location is often used today in advertising layouts since its strong emphasis on the central object gives it a powerful impact. The use of a single triangle as a compositional basis tends to create a quite formal division of the space, and is very successfully demonstrated by a Renoir painting from the late nineteenth century (figure 1-5).

The Golden Section Division

A golden section is a ratio in which the smaller amount to the larger is the same as that of the larger to the sum of both. The use of some algebra to solve this as a quadratic equation shows that if the smaller amount is five units, the larger will be very close to eight units; the total, therefore, will be thirteen units.

Any line, such as one of the edges of a canvas, can be divided into short and long segments using the golden section so that the short one is five-thirteenths of the total length of the line and the longer one is eight-thirteenths of the total length. The short segment is said to have a length of five units; the longer, eight units. (It is important to remember that a unit is not an actual, fixed measurement as is, say, an inch or a meter. It's simply a mathematical indication—a tool used to calculate the proportions of the golden section.)

One of the properties of the golden section proportion that attracted the attention of artists centuries ago was that it provided the ability to continually divide the edges of a golden section rectangle (a rectangle having the proportions of eight units in length and five units in width) by the same five-to-eight proportion, creating an unlimited number of key locations within the canvas, with no two space divisions the same. This is demonstrated in figure 1-6.

Although the proportions of standard-size drawing pads and canvases do not quite match the golden section rectangle proportions (as you can see in figure 1-7—standard paper sizes are shown in solid lines, and the golden section rectangle proportions are shown in broken lines), this lack of direct correlation is immaterial, since you can choose to divide the edges of any of these standard-size pads or canvases by the golden section and achieve variety of spatial distribution, as shown in figure 1-8.

As well as dividing the edge of a canvas by the golden section, each of the resulting line segments can be divided to create a series of nonduplicated key locations at which to place elements within your drawing (see figure 1-10.)

figure 1-9 illustrates the four different ways the golden section can be applied using the edges of any rectangular canvas. The horizontal and vertical edges of the rectangle can be divided into long and short proportions (eight units and five units) or into short and long proportions (five and eight). The combination of these possibilities results in different arrangements within the rectangle.

Your imagination is the only limit to the application of the golden section to obtain variety in space division on your drawing surface. In fact, a drawing area of any proportions can be divided into unequal areas by any of several methods. For example, division by the combination of the square and the golden section can be seen in figure 1-11. After the square is drawn, the horizontal edge of the remaining portion is divided by the golden section.

Other examples of space division are shown in figure 1-12. In A, both edges of the square are divided by the golden section. In B, a square is first constructed from the left vertical edge, then the remaining rectangle is divided by the golden section—first on the horizontal edge, then on the vertical. The vertical edge of the square is also divided by the golden section. In C, I divided the rectangle by a diagonal and then drew an arbitrary vertical line. Where the vertical crossed the diagonal, I drew a horizontal line. In D, I divided the rectangle in half vertically, then applied the golden section to the horizontal edge on the right half. Next, I divided the portion from that line to the left edge by the golden section. I applied the golden section to the vertical edge as well.

Remember, there is no one way to achieve variety of space division. The important thing is to consciously strive to avoid the monotony of equally spaced key features and equally sized areas on your drawing space before you start to draw your subject matter.

Examples from Master Artists

Examination of some applications of the space division principles as used by master artists will show you how the golden section division is effectively applied in landscape pictures. The main elements of the compositions are shown schematically. (For comparison with the original paintings, see any of the more comprehensive art books in your library or books on the individual artists mentioned.) These examples are by no means the only applications of the golden section division. Constable, for instance, more times than not, used the golden section proportion to locate his horizon. Check this out for yourself by measuring the distance from the bottom of one of his scenes to the horizon, then dividing this number by the distance from the bottom to the top of the scene; it will give you a number very close to .38, which is five-thirteenths. The remaining distance, from the horizon to the top of the scene, is then eight-thirteenths of the total height. This can be seen in figure 1-13, where the composition of Constable's The Leaping Horse is shown in schematic form. The horizon location is based on the golden section proportion. In this composition, the picture area is also divided by a square, along one side of which the main tree trunks and foreground pilings are located. Other examples of Constable's use of the golden section are indicated in the schematics of figures 1-14, 1-15, and 1-16.

Van der Neer divided the picture area of his A Winter Scene using the five-to-eight proportion. The skaters are in the larger portion, and all the near trees are in the smaller portion, as you see in figure 1-17.

figure 1-18 shows how Turner placed the darkest element of his Fighting Temeraire, a black smokestack, at the five-eighths division. Gauguin and Homer also used that proportion in their landscapes, as shown in figures 1-19 and 1-20. A multiple use of the golden section proportion can be seen in Millet's The Gleaners, outlined in figure 1-21.

Every rule has its exceptions, and every convention of art can be successfully ignored if done so in a knowledgeable way. For instance, it is often said that the canvas should not be divided in half by a prominent picture element—Cézanne, however, divided his Landscape with Viaduct (shown schematically in figure 1-22) in half with a tree, then divided the right half of the picture in half horizontally with the viaduct. This produced three principal picture areas within one work. So, experimentation certainly is not ruled out by the conventions used to get variety into compositions.

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Excerpted from The DRAWING HANDBOOK by Frank J. Lohan. Copyright © 1993 Frank J. Lohan. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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