Don't Get Stuck in the Middle

Around and Up, oil, 8x10

This past week I held a one-day Composition Boot Camp workshop at my studio. The subject of my demo above had several elements that could easily get stuck in the middle. I teach a method for planning out your composition that addresses this, among many other objectives.

In "Around and Up," I wanted a variety of shapes going across the top of the painting, but I didn't want the shape between the two trees to end up dead center. I also didn't want the edge of the left tree to stop at the center. You can see in my sketch below that I placed those shapes in relation to the center and then followed this little "map" when blocking in my painting.

But even after addressing the placement of the major shapes of the composition in the thumbnail sketch, and then in the block-in, the challenge is then to keep it all in place as the painting progresses. If you've been an artist for awhile, you know all too well how things "creep" into the middle of your composition if you don't carefully keep them in their proper place. It's when your thought process shifts from placing the elements to further defining them, that those elements start moving themselves around from their original spot. In my demo above, I kept a close eye on those positive and negative spaces at the top to keep things in place.

Unless your painting relies on a strong statement in which center placement is part of the message being conveyed, you normally want to avoid it. Of course, something in your composition will need to fall across the center areas of the painting. I normally try to be sure no element of the painting is emphasized along the center (i.e., hard edges, sharp contrast, saturated color), and if it is, I'll subdue that area.

Below are a couple of other recent demos from a workshop I taught in Chattanooga, TN last week:

View from Highway 24, oil, 14x11

Evening Glow on Wyanett Creek, oil, 14x11

Upcoming Workshops:

The following three out of my next seven workshops still have room:

OIL Workshop - Dallas, GA - 1-day 

January 31, 2015 (Sat.)

Paulding Fine Arts Association

11 Courthouse Sq., 2nd Floor

Dallas, GA

$125 PFAA members; $150 nonmembers

Contact Peggy Cline at 770-445-4572 or peggycline@att.net 

Visit www.pauldingfinearts.org for more details.

PASTEL Workshop - Stevensville, MD - 3-day 

Workshop - February 6, 7 & 8, 2015 (Fri/Sat/Sun)

Demo-only option: - Fri., Feb. 6, 9 am - noon(ish), $45 (prepay), $55 at door

Chesapeake Fine Art Studio 

609 Thompson Creek Rd.

Stevensville, MD 21666

(about 40 minutes from downtown Baltimore)

$400

www.chesapeakefineartstudio.com

410-200-8019

OIL/PASTEL Workshop - Dahlonega, GA - 2-day 

March 19 & 20, 2015 (Thurs/Fri)

The Art Loft

Dahlonega, GA

www.artloft.net 

$285

To register, visit www.artloft.net.