I recently was talking with a student about composition and they were asking me what is good composition when it comes to painting and thats when my face melted off and I cursed all the rules of paintings books and correct ways of drawing. Once I was done with that I shared some of the ways I like to think about composition, and I thought I would expand on the ways here with you.
Some things to note, these are not ‘correct’ answers to the query, they are my curiosities in response to the query. You can look up a million articles, read plenty of books and fry your eyes out of your head on this topic in endless numbers of ways, that is not what we will be doing here. I will share over the next few weeks, a few ways I like to explore composition for myself- and I want to encourage you find your own ways in addition to mine if any of them resonate for you!
This week, we will discuss:
Movies!
Yes, babe, movies! Sit down on the couch! Put your phone away! Watch that old movie you’ve been thinking about! Pay attention to how the color affects the mood- look at how scenes tell a story. Press pause, ask yourself what you are seeing, what is in and out of the frame, how you are pulled around and why.
Movies are a great way to explore composition because they are also taking the viewer into account, the audience is a built in framework.
Movies are one of my favorite ways to consider storytelling and composition- and here are a few of my favs.
These are of course just a few stills from a few movies- but I think it can be super helpful in thinking about how the framing of a scene helps convey the narrative and mood of the script- which can help inform your own formulas.
I share the above to show how it is all connected and also all riddiculous. It can be easy to feel like it all has to be serious- but my hope is that by showing you some of these movies and compositions we can begin to understand it is playful and weird and its ok to experiment and push the compositions we are drawn to.
A normal thing by most artists is to use a composition that they are comfortable with without questioning if the composition could be pushed! Can the composition be expanded, challenged, more interesting- most of the time it can!
I will leave you with this- pay attention to how composition is used in the things you love. Where do your eyes move, how does it affect the mood. How do you think it would feel if you altered certain things? This is not about correctness, there are certain things that are true but the edges are fuzzy and meant to be messed with. Pay attention- be curious and maybe you might unlock a few new things about composition.
If you feel up to it- share some of your favorite compositions in the comments- tell me what you notice, what you think- I would love to see and discuss this more!
Keep painting, keep making cool things, keep showing up. We need your work in the world.
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Oh my goodness: YESSS to this!
Another great share. The beginning of ‘The Wizard of Oz’, the B&W bit is beautifully like woodcuts of fairytales. Little fore-telling tableaux, with Dorothy pacing about as a kind of character study and the location, Kansas being its own benign character in preemptive contrast to the plasticky Oz.
Plasticky colour in a totally different, grungey way is used so horribly well in The Shining. The 70s hues and big surface patterns really enhance the screechy violence at work through the whole film. Also love how space is used in this film, the claustrophobic apartment at the start and the vast yet suffocating heavy expanses of space at the hotel. Hopper gone super dark?
In an interview I saw, David Hockney talked about being super inspired by the movies he saw as a child in the UK - old B&W films featuring scenes of things like roads in California with long shadows of trees. He grew up in dark Northern England and was captivated by the idea that in California the light was so different. He talked about this being a big reason he flew to America as soon as he could in his late teens/early twenties.
Compositional Inspo is everywhere. Thanks for this great reminder to keep my eyes peeled for it!
I remember my figure drawing teacher in college showing me stills from Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom for composition inspo. Cut to me binging all of his movies at the time. Movies are so inspiring! Love this newsletter – thanks for sharing Lindsay. So informative ❤️