Gimme Five

Intuitive Composition. Before you get to intuitive drawing, you may have to discover the rules of classic composition.

Mattise laid awake at night...

1. Sketch in your center of focus first, then arrange the rest of your composition around it. Of course, you will usually have the center offset, as most good compositions follow the Golden Mean outline.
2. Look at a thousand works by advanced artists and master's works. Learn how they have used the Golden Mean, and it will ingrain in you this not-so-secret formula of compositional success.
3. Include the knowledge of the Fibonacci Spiral with your Golden Rectangle. I am a believer in taking the viewer's eye for a walk around my painting, and the spiral is the basic tool for this. Other tools include lines and patterns that suggest where the center of interest is. Another secret of mine is keeping the eye on the picture plane. More on that later.
   
4. Be your own harshest critic. Before someone else is. What I mean is, learn to decide whether a composition of yours is better as is, or might be better re-arranged. Make the changes, or don't be afraid to discard the whole sketch.
5. Brutally discard details that don't matter to the direction of your piece or your art. Mattise laid awake at night because someone complained, asking him why he hadn't used shadows and perspectives with his forms. By morning, he retorted to the air, "because they don't add anything to what I am saying!"

Not feeling intuitive? Go here for the Golden Rectangle PC cheater tool.
Need to cheat the Golden Spiral? Here you go. Reference to Fibonacci.

Enter The Atelier

Now, to look at the little Hoquiam Shipyard painting through the lens of classic realism.

Early in her book, Aristides provides one of the best explanations of the "Golden Mean" I have read. Without getting into the math, philosophy and science here, I'll offer the interested this link (One-Over-The-World web link, everything you could ever hope to learn about the Golden Mean). Cut to the chase and see the application of the Golden Number to art.

But, how did my "intuitive" composition hold up to the "school solution" methods of arranging the elements of my picture? I went to Photoshop to see.

The first jpeg gives an overlay of the Golden Mean (GM). Hmmn, I thought. Not too revealing. I guess I did have the key lines of my building-boat masses parallel to a GM line (short line). And, the line of background elements sort of fit the theory, although not quite parallel with the long axis GM line.

Then, I decided that it was kosher to look at the main elements of the picture, and to group them as a GM box (jpeg below). Nice! The green outline is the GM 1:1.6 ratio box that is the anointed "perfect ration" outline (well, not to scale, but the idea is there). The pink-violet lines are the lines of interest of the anointed pictures. The upper yellow line shows a parallel line that I employed, and the other yellow lines complete the magic triangle so well known by lovers of the Renaissance artists.

Well, not too bad. I describe myself as "self taught," but I actually have studied a thing or two about art and drawing over the years. It's just fun once and a while to hold these things up to the light of the classical drawing standards and see how they compare.

In the end, I do have troubles with a few things in my painting. The way that the right most line of the building lines up with the boat's housing line gives me fits. In one way, it helps the grouping cohere, but on the other hand it makes it harder for the eye to distinguish the boat from that background element. If I were to re-do this painting in a larger format, I would monkey with that to see what I liked better. What do you artists out there think of that part?

Further, there are some crude aspects to the boat hull and the tall legs of the large building, but I also kind of like the way the pastel mimics the brush strokes of an oil painting and just left it as is.

The main thing is, I wanted to take this piece fresh from my studio and in my less intellectual state of mind, and critique it against the searing light of "perfect drawing" skills as shown in the new Atelier book. In the end, I am happy that my composition is in the ballpark, and I very much enjoy that turquoise color!

Golden Ratio Links:

http://cuip.uchicago.edu/~dlnarain/golden/
http://www.goldennumber.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rectangle
Play with an interactive Golden Rectangle - fun!
Just the facts
Blogger Post On Subject
An Approximative Approach
Museum of Harmony