Hi everyone! Chiken here.
Welcome to chapter three, Planning and Composition.
In this chapter, I will go through
how I come up with ideas for
painting and draft them in thumbnails sketches.
In this lesson, we will start with
composition rules, and some tips to make
an illustration look more interesting.
In character art, our main subject or focal point
will be our character, so our aim is to
position our camera and everything else around the character
in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, and draws
the viewer's attention to the character.
There is a video that summarizes various composition
rules on YouTube that I think explains everything
really well, and I'll leave the link to
that video in the class notes.
But for this lesson, I'll talk about the main
rules I use and how I use them.
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Firstly, the rule of thirds.
Simply put, if we draw a 3x3
grid on a canvas, your subject should
be placed in either of these cross sections.
Even if I have different dimensions,
this rule will still apply.
If you want to take this further, you can have
a secondary focal point or subject, and it can be
placed at the opposite end of the grid.
For example, if our main character sits here,
then we should place our secondary subject here.
And if our main subject is here,
our secondary subject can go up here.
You can see how I utilize the rule of thirds in these paintings.
They may not be perfectly lined
up, but it acts as a really good guide.
The next rule is about balance.
When we look at the painting, there's the
visual weight that each subject can have.
The visual weight just refers to the amount
of attention a subject draws to itself.
For example, if I sketch this out, we can
see that the visual weight is very heavy on
the right side and there's no sense of balance.
But if we switch the background the other way,
that looks a lot nicer because the visual weight
is distributed more evenly throughout the painting.
You can see here in these examples, if my character is
on the right, then the visual weight of the background will
be more distributed to the left and vice versa.
If I flip the background or the character, we
can see that it becomes not so balanced.
Similarly, we can balance the
foreground elements as well.
This time let's center our character.
And if I put all the foreground elements on the right side
of the painting, it doesn't look too good.
But if I switch this bottom part from right to left,
we will get a more even distribution and visual weight.
We can see that being done in these paintings,
my character here holds most of the visual weight,
so on the other side of the painting will
be where I concentrate the foreground elements.
I also have these examples here, with the character
centrered, with the foreground elements on one side, the
visual weight looks off. But when we switch it
to the other side, everything looks more balanced.
Same for this example, the difference may be subtle
but they'll improve your drawing by a lot.
That being said, unless you are deliberately going
for symmetry in a painting, the visual weight
does not have to be exactly even.
In fact, sometimes it can look a bit weird.
If I have my character here...
and we draw our mountain as tall as she is it won't look good.
When things are on the same level, they
can kind of compete for our eyes attention.
So in this case, because our character is the main
focal point, I will make her taller and more prominent
and the mountains in the background can be shorter.
This is kind of related to the rule of thirds too.
And the last composition rule I use a lot,
is the use of different layers of ground.
Most significantly, the use of foregrounds in a painting,
especially in character art, it can be a very
quick and easy way to frame your subject nicely.
You can see that I use this in almost all my paintings.
Usually, there are plant elements but
sometimes it's water droplets or bubbles.
Not only will they give your painting a more
organic and active feel, but they can very easily
turn a boring composition into something interesting.
And for the placement of the foreground elements, I
usually put the bulk of it in the corners
as that is usually where it frames our character
best. And we can use the previous rules to
guide us on which corner to place them on.
For the background, we can have different layers of ground
too. Like this example, where there are many different layers
of rocks, some are closer, and some are further away.
Or this example, where there's many layers to the
background that give us a sense of space. And again
we can refer to our previous rules to decide where
to place each element.
In this lesson, we we learnt about some basic composition rules,
and how to use them to create a nice scene.
In the next lesson, we will try to apply these concepts
and use references to come up with thumbnail sketches.