Painting 1/4 – Composition
- Composition
- Coloured base (underpainting)
- Painting loose
- Adding details to the focal points
Composition or placement of objects on the canvas is an important task. A mistake here can completely ruin the end result, no matter how hard we try in the next steps to fix things. In order to easily handle the compositional sketch, we can choose a simple reference photo. The photo may have been taken at the "golden hour", but it could be a simple, reportage photo, on a cloudy day when we were walking around. We can now experiment with the photo by cutting off areas of the photo with different aspect ratios and choosing the one we like best. Don't look for unique photos, because the colors in the photo don't matter much for the drawing. This is something we can always change according to our imagination.
For this example, I wanted to paint something panoramic and had a 60x20cm canvas available i.e. 3:1 scale. I chosed a photo where the sky is too bright and the hilly meadow - too dark. In addition, the photo does not fit the scale of the canvas. At first glance, the picture is not something special, but in the middle there is a very good panoramic view - we just have to remove some of the bright clouds and rocks at the bottom.
Тhe edited photo looks better? There is a reason - it has been processed with a “shadows and highlights” filter in the "Darktable" software. The purpose in this case is to lighten too dark or darken too light areas of the photo. Sometimes a photo can be used as a reference for more than a single painting - we just have to look at it in several different ways.
If we use a graphite pencil then it is good to thin the strokes with a rubber. Water-soluble paints may not fit well to the canvas if the graphite is too tight in places (because it is greasy and repels water). For these paints we can solve the issue just by using watercolor pencils or charcoal. If we use oil paints then we should be careful with light colours (yellow). Pushing the brush too hard on the canvas there is a risk of color mixing with the graphite and light colours will become dirty.
There is no need to mark every single object with a pencil, we just need to sketch roughly the most interesting. When drawing with paints, the inability to draw with a pencil can be a great advantage!