Intro
This week we were introduced to the very important concepts of composition and perspective. Composition is the organization of elements of an object, photograph or painting that make up a scene. Certain rules of composition can make a picture look much more appealing to the viewer and can make a painting look a lot more interesting.
Some of these ideas include the Rule of Thirds, which divides the frame into thirds both horizontally and vertically, presenting areas within which you could place the focus point of the painting. Or the idea of leading lines, which establish a guide and help the viewing eye naturally find your painting’s focus point.
Perspective on the other hand refers to representing three dimensional objects on a two dimensional plane whilst keeping intact their properties of depth, height, width, size and relative position to each other.
Practice
I began by practicing drawing some very simple shapes in different perspectives within photoshop.
One point perspective refers to images with only one vanishing point on the horizon line (in this case marked with a red X), points at which receding parallel lines viewed in perspective appear to converge.
Images in two point perspective contain two vanishing points, which are on the horizon line.
Images in three point perspective contain three vanishing points.
Original piece
I began my piece by establishing a horizon line and then sketching some shapes, I had the idea of drawing a street with the focus point laying on the bottom left third of the image. I started painting in the sky, as I felt it would help me establish the overall mood of the painting, at this point I didn’t really know what to put at the focus of my painting so I left it out of the sketch.
I continued blocking in colour within the shapes to establish some buildings on a street, I then moved on to adding in detail into the scene. I wasn’t quite sure what style I wanted to paint in so I tried a sketchy cartoon-like style as well as a slightly more realistic hard-edged style.
I decided I preferred the latter style more so I painted in the rest of my picture with a similar look. After painting in the main composition of my picture I decided upon making the focus point of my image a tree, so I painted one in at the focal point of my image.
Conclusion
I’m happy with how this piece turned out and I think I adequately demonstrated some general ideas of composition such as the rule of thirds and leading lines into the piece. If I decided to work on it further I would have added some more detail to the buildings in the foreground. I noticed during the process of this painting that at this point I am very familiar with photoshop and my workflow has improved exponentially since the first week.