Composition - Part 2

TUESDAY TIPS & TRICKS

A month ago we started talking about composition in sketching in a post Composition is a Big Word. Today we will continue discussing composition and talk about several rules.

1. Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds is an easy compositional rule to remember. Splitting an image in half vertically or horizontally produces a sketch with a point of interest squarely in the middle. This can be just a little bit boring.

Instead divide a page in thirds both horizontally and vertically, and place the focus of the sketch in one of the spots where the lines intersect. As a result a viewer eye is drawn to the strongest point in one of the intersections, then around the sketch following the lines of the object.

At first it may be helpful to draw the lines to section the drawing in thirds and use them as an aid to find "sweet spots" as they are sometimes called. After some practice the lines will become unnessessary and you will just see where the strongest impact spot is. If you do thumbnail sketches first, draw the grid of thirds on top to check the composition.

2. Rule of Odds

How many of anything is included in a composition makes a difference. An easy thing to remember is that odd is better than even, an odd number make a composition more dynamic.

When there is an odd number of objects in an drawing it is harder to pair them up, which we do subconsciously, and this means that we will be staying in the drawing longer and keep our eyes moving within the drawing.

Of course if we are sketching in a sidewalk cafe and drawing four people sitting at a table in front of us, skipping one or inventing one extra may not be the best solution. Instead we can be creative and check for interesting reflections, or a shadow, or a pigeon!

There are 6 bottles in this drawing - an even number, but 3 strong and interesting shadows bring the number of shapes to 9.

3. Full range of values

For a good composition we want to have a full gamut of values in the image: from lightest lights to mid tones to darkest darks. If we have this variety of values, the drawing is already pretty good. For a really strong composition the lights, mid tones and darks need to be included in different amounts. Here's a simple way to remember it: "two thirds, one third, and a little bit." For example, "two thirds of dark, one third of mid tone, and a little bit of white for flowers and highlights"

4. Golden Ratio

No discussion of composition is complete without talking about Golden Ratio. This magical ratio is also known as Golden Section, Golden Mean, Golden Number, Divine Proportion, Golden Proportion, Fibonacci Number, and Phi. Leonardo da Vinci used Golden Ratio in his paintings quite a lot.

This is an extremely interesting and beautiful concept. I enjoy reading about it, but was unable to use it when sketching on location - it is a matter of time. So I cannot talk about from a practical standpoint. Instead I would like to refer you to this article on Empty Easel blog - Golden Section for Artists.

I hope you find these thoughts on composition useful and would love it if you will use them in your sketches!

Composition is a big word

TUESDAY TIPS & TRICKS

Composition can be difficult to teach. Do this, don't do that… Unless you want to deliberately break the rules… And then it may or may not work… You stick to the rules - and it may end up boring. You break the rules - and it may end up unbalanced… What is a sketcher to do?

Composition is a skill, just like drawing or values or accurate color. This means that with practice a sketcher can develop a vision and understanding of the design as well as a feel for positioning of shapes within the boundaries of a drawing. By practicing composition it is possible to get and improve the sense and sensibility of what is composed well and as a result has a built-in beauty, and what needs improvement and what this improvement might be.

Composition is also a vast subject. This is another reason art students shy away from it.

Here I will suggest three things that can be practiced right away. They will work for on-location sketching without burying one's head in theory.

1. Balance positive and negative space

See that your actual objects of interest (positive space) and space around them (negative space) take more or less the same amount of space on your drawing.

Some examples:

- Crowded drawing - very little negative space

- Unfilled drawing - small subject surrounded by a lot of negative space

- Balanced drawing - subject and surrounding space take about the same amount of space

Remember a trick - an empty unfilled composition can be improved by creative cropping or borders.

2. Repetition and pattern

A human eye loves pattern. When we see and recognize repeating shapes it makes us feel clever and calms us. Repeats and patterns give an image rhythm and make it dynamic and lively.

3. Connection

Let your subjects and objects connect, touch and overlap. This is one and an obvious way to keep the composition together, like holding hands.

The other way to connect is by intent, using directional lines and visual tension.

Here's an example of a composition with overlapping objects:

In the following sketch three groups of people are connected by individual figures situated between the groups. These figures create the tension that holds the composition together:

So what to do now?

Now that you have these insights, it is time to practice them. When you chose your subject or view, take another minute and make a tiny plan. Here's an example of such plan: "I will include this bridge, and the river with its interesting colors and these trees on the right bank. I will leave out these buildings on the right shore, and a willow tree on the left… they will overcrowd my drawing." Better yet, make a thumbnail sketch and see how it looks.

Take the view you are sketching and make it into a design. Emphasize patterns if they are there. Look for geometrical patterns, color patterns, contrast patterns.

Check if your shapes connect/overlap or stand alone. If they are standing alone, is there a way create a connection or directional pull to tie the composition together? Even if there is not, you have taught yourself something about composition by having tried. 

Tuesday Tips & Tricks: Thoughts on Talent

Many times, as I am sitting sketching in a park or a cafe, someone would stop by, look over my shoulder, and then say with a wistful air "I wish I had your talent… I'd like to draw too…"

I usually hesitate to tell them, but I will tell you: I have no talent.

What I have is an incessant desire to make images. I have persistence and tenacity. I gave up on instant gratification and the need to look good right away. I bought in on an idea of 10,000 hours. But talent… no, definitely not. But let's examine the situation with more attention.

For decades I did not draw or paint or make art, because I was convinced that I had no "talent". Fairly late in life I came up with a rebellious idea that I don't actually need this thing "talent" to draw or paint. Ha! What a liberation it was! I took a pencil and did an exercise from a drawing book, the year was 2009:

I did more exercises from books, and interestingly enough my drawings got better.

Then I came across a book by Malcolm Gladwell "Outliers: The Story of Success" and read about 10,000 hours concept. The idea is that you need about 10,000 hours of practice to get good at whatever you want to get good at. I did the math: working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, gives 2,000 hours of practice in one year. In 2010 I've barely scratched the surface… I realized that I needed 5 years of dedicated practice. I also realized that I don't need "talent", I need skill. That was doable, and I got to work.

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

These are some examples. I did a lot more stuff than that. I painted and studied, and later on taught as well. 

Today, in 2014, I have done my 5 years - 10,000 hours. I have moved from being afraid of putting a pencil to paper to being a professional artist and a painting instructor. 

Here's one more thing to keep in mind. In the beginning of your 10,000 hours quantity is more important than quality. There once was an experiment in a pottery class of an art school. For one semester a class was divided in 2 halves. Students in the first group were asked to make one single pot each during the time of that semester, but it should be the best pot they ever made. The grade would be given based on the quality of that single pot. The second group was asked to make as many pots as they possibly can, quality and beauty not important. These students would get their grades based on the number of pots they made, the more the better. As you probably guessed, by the end of the semester pots produced by the "quantity" group  were better and more beautiful than single pots made by the "quality" group. 

This example comes from a book "Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking" by David Bayles and Ted Orland. You can get this book from Amazon for under $4.00 used. It is a little book - 120 pages, small format - with a lot of wisdom. This will be the best art book you ever bought.

A practical and observable shift in quality of work occurs through practice and work. "Talent" is not even a part of this equation.

During my years of practice and self-study I arrived to several conclusions that I want to share with you:

1. If you can write a grocery list - you can draw too. You have all visual and motor skills that you need.
2. There is no such thing as talent. Talent is a man-made construct that is not really helpful.
3. Drawing can be taught. Why do you think there are so many art schools and art teachers. Find the right one. Teaching yourself works too.
4. Practice and time on task is all there is. Don't just trust me, try for yourself. Then come back in 6 months and thank me :).

Tuesday Tips & Tricks: … and We Share Our Work Online

So you went out, sketched, and your sketch turned out rather nice. You want to share it with your friends on USk Chicago group and on your blog and on ….

You took a picture of your sketch or perhaps you scanned it, and it looks like this - flat and grayed out and, for heaven's sake, crooked.

What can you do? You don't have Photoshop, you are just a regular sketcher and cannot pay prices equal to GDP of a small country for a piece of photo editing software.

The answer is  GIMP! GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo editing, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. You can download it here - http://www.gimp.org/downloads/.

The urban legend has it that a few former Adobe cowboys/engineers with a grudge of some sort got together and produced this "almost Photoshop" amazing piece of software and put it up for everyone to use. I don't know if this is true, I read it on the Internet :). But one thing is true - GIMP is FREE under Creative Commons License.

Anyway, download your free GIMP and install it. Now you are ready for action.

Here are steps we are going to take:

1. Rotate
2. Crop
3. Curves to restore contrast
4. Unsharp Mask to sharpen details
5. Scale to reduce size
6. Export to save the file

Let's do it step by step. Open GIMP on your computer and open your unprocessed sketch in GIMP. Let me know if you need help with that and I will add a Step 0 to this tutorial.

Step 1 - Rotate

Click the Rotate button in the Tool Box on the left panel and you will see a grid come up over the sketch and a Rotate window open.

Grab the corner of the image with your cursor and rotate. When the level will look satisfactory release the cursor and click Rotate button in the Rotate window. The rotated image will look like this:

Step 2 - Crop

Click Rectangular Select button and drag your cursor over the sketch creating a rectangle. Manipulate the selection in such way that it is nice and tight around your meaningful image.

When satisfied with your selection, click on Image menu and then on Crop to Selection.

Your sketch will look like this. Nice!

Step 3 - Curves

Photographing or scanning an image grays out colors and and reduces contrast. We will restore that using Curves. Click on Colors menu and then click Curves.

A Curves work window will come up. The diagonal line in this window determines your values and contrasts. Play with it by dragging it with your cursor to see what happens to the sketch due to your action. When tired of playing, get back to work :)! Drag the line into a shallow S curve and nudge its curves up and down a little until contrasts and colors in your GIMP image resemble your sketch on paper in real life. Click OK when satisfied.

Step 4 - Unsharp Mask

Photographing or scanning an image not only grays out your colors and flattens values, it also reduces sharpness. We will restore it in this step. Click on Filters menu, then select Enhance, then Unsharp Mask. You could also work with Sharpen at this level, but Unsharp Mask is smoother and produces less digital noise.

A work window will come up. Drag the levels so some meaningful portion of sketch is shown in the Preview window. Set Radius to 5.0 and Amount to 0.50. Threshold can be 0 or 1, I cannot see any difference between them. These settings will give you a nicely sharpened image and will not introduce too much aberrations. Click OK when done.

Step 5 - Scale Image

Many images coming from cameras or scanners are big, or sometimes you hear them referred to as fat. They have a lot of megabytes in them and can slow down loading pages. It makes sense to slim them down by reducing resolution and size. Click Image menu and then Scale Image.

A work window will come up. If you are preparing the image for displaying it online a resolution of 72 dpi is good, and size should not be bigger than a laptop screen. 

My images for the web usually are about 10x8" and 72 dpi. This is what we are going to do here. Click Scale when done.

Step 6 - Export

We have a very nicely processed sketch now. Time to save it. Unfortunately, some terms in GIMP are not as intuitive as we might wish, and clicking on Save will not produce a file type we want. Instead click on File menu and then select Export. This will allow to save the file in your computer directory in a JPEG format (or many other formats if you want them). But JPEG will do nicely :).

And here's our result - ready to share!

We hope this is helpful, and we will be seeing many shared sketches on USk Chicago group from now on.

Let's sketch Chicago - Lincoln Square - July 19, 2014

Lincoln Square in Chicago is a winner location, and we are never tired of it. On July 19 we gathered in Lincoln Square for the third time, and it was the biggest group ever!

Here are some photos to document the sketch crawl.

Our sketches from Lincoln Square!

Lee, Sandra, a sketcher whose name I forgot, and Mary

Cal (Curtis)

Chris

Daniel

Jack

Jodie and Kordt

Lisa

Looking at Lisa's sketch over her shoulder

New member of the group

Lee, Sandra, USk Chicago member, and Mary

And afterwords we went to Brauhaus. We had beer, pretzels (amazing!), and brats and talked about sketching, pens, sketchbooks, and future plans. What a great day it was!

Urban Sketchers in Brauhaus

Tuesday Tips & Tricks: Sketching Blindly in the Dark

How many times did you have to attend a boring event? Yep, me too. Often it is a fancy party or a benefit for some very noble cause you get to attend with your spouse. It is their cause, and you are just along for solidarity and support. Yawn! 

But don't fret! We got you covered! All you need is this:

A little book and a pen will fit in your evening clutch or sport coat pocket. Get them out when they will begin speeches. Keep your eyes on the speaker. It is too dark to see anything on your paper anyway. Have the pen touch the paper and go. Trace the shape of his head with your eyes and let your fingers follow with the pen. Then his neck and shoulders. What is he wearing? Trace those lapels. Is there any hair? Add it, if applicable. If you want, you can glance down at your paper every so often - this is not a test.

When you have the basic outline down add some darks. Just scribble in any way you like to create dark masses. Add facial features without being too specific. Put in some details, if you have time: a tie, a necklace if any. You are done. Turn the page and find another victim attendee.

You may find that your heads are sometimes detached from shoulders. Facial features may land outside the heads, a tie may be pinned to a shoulder like a tail on a donkey. This all is fine and even great, you don't have to show your drawings to anyone. You will also find these sketches oddly expressive and free. And you will realize that you are no longer bored. In fact you may not even notice that they finished with speeches, and it is time for the rubber chicken. Good. You can sketch that woman sitting across from you.

What you are doing is practicing blind contour drawing.  Blind contour drawing is a method of drawing where an artist draws the contour of a subject without looking at the paper. This artistic technique was introduced by Kimon Nicolaïdes in The Natural Way to Draw, and then made popular in Betty Edwards'  The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

Nicolaïdes instructed his students to imagine that the pencil point is actually touching the contour of the subject. He suggested that the technique improves students' drawings because it causes students to use both senses of sight and touch. Blind contour drawing trains the eye and hand to work as a team, and it helps to really see all of the details of the object. 

The drawings above I sketched blindly in the dark at a benefit for Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis I attended with my husband. The speeches were coma inducing and the chicken awful… I had fun!

Remember the sketch meet in Chinatown?

Yes, that one - back in August? Well, I did two drawings there and only now managed to blog about them. Here they are:

These are the two of the 12 Zodiac statues several of us drew. I think this was one of the most fun sketch crawls USk Chicago did. Check us out :)!