Day 16. Compose yourself!

Let's pull ourselves together.

Good day, GUTsters!

Look at you, drawing every day. I hope you feel proud of yourself. I am cheering for you from here.

The past five days we have learned about nearly ALL the basic elements of drawing. Your PhD will be in your mailbox soon! Though we do have one more quick lesson before we finish our Drawing Basics.

Alright, today we take all the elements you’ve learned — line, shape, form, value, negative and positive space — and roll them into one excellent topic.

Drumroll please….

Composition!

We learned a little about composition when we explored negative and positive space. As a refresher: Composition is the way elements are arranged in space. That space could be on a canvas, on a piece of paper, in a room, anything, anywhere. In every composition there are three spatial elements:

Positive space (subjects), negative space (the space around the subjects), and the frame (the boundaries of the paper/canvas/room you are working within.)

With those three elements you can do anything you want, but they will always always always work in unison. How you arrange these elements will create harmony, tension, focus, overwhelm, whatever you want.

Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it. Here are four identical circles just floating in space. Each one does the same thing as the other. Which is, admittedly, not a lot.

Booooorrrriiinggggg.

But! Introduce FRAMES around them, and what happens? You get STORIES. You get FEELINGS. You get INTERESTINGNESS, just by introducing positive & negative SPACE.

Now what do you see? What does each ball say to you? What does each composition FEEEEEL like? (Also, I am holding down a little piece of paper over the upper right circle because it’s out of the frame, and turns out my colored pencils do not easily erase.

The circles didn’t change. But by placing a frame around them, a positive and negative space is created, and that means you get a composition. Composition = feelings and/or a story.

You know I’m gonna show you some good art before we do our drawing today. :)

Compo-Inspo

Here are two paintings by artist Amy Sherald. In the first she places her subject right in the middle, facing the viewer. In the second, she places the subject(s) further away in space.

Amy Sherald, She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them, 2018; oil on canvas, 54 x 43 inches. Courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It, from 2019.© Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Feels very different, right?

“I paint as a way of looking for myself in the world.” - Amy Sherald

Matisse’s cut outs

Artist Henri Matisse used scissors like pencils and pens, cutting organic shapes out of painted paper and arranging them to “draw” whimsical compositions. I took these photos at Matisse’s Cut-Outs, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in NY in late 2024.

The shapes and space make a feeling and a story — and so does COLOR.

Gerhart Richter’s Thumbnails

Often artists will create thumbnail sketches to figure out their composition before they start working on an actual art piece. Below are some fun examples of composition sketches by painter Gerhard Richter. Check out the ones on the left. So simple and powerful! Just two colors and they pack a punch.

A glimpse into Richter’s notebooks!

Composition is super fun to play with. You can only figure out what does and doesn’t work by messing around with it. By not being precious. By letting go of there being a right and wrong way to do something. By trying a bunch of different approaches (like we did with those 10 circles) and deciding which YOU like, and what feels right for the drawing you want to create.

So grab some colors and decide on a frame. Time to experiment with this ourselves.