Robie is an artist who loves sharing what she has learned about art and painting in the hope that it might help other creatives.
A Good Composition Acts as a Strong Armature for the Painting
The most important factor for the success or failure of a painting is its composition.
The composition of a painting is the supporting structure of the painting. A good arrangement of elements acts as a strong armature, and it makes the piece strong and interesting for the viewer.
While most artists have a great visual taste and can often recognize a good composition almost immediately, just from instinct and visual preferences, effective design is rarely achieved just from instinct and improvisation. It typically takes some careful planning.
Planning a painting, spending time making value studies, and testing out different compositions may seem like a big waste of time, especially to those that have only a very limited time that can be dedicated to creating art.
However, the time spent on the initial planning makes it much easier and faster to make the hundreds of small decisions involved with painting.
Elements of a Strong Composition
To plan your painting well, you need to keep in mind the elements that make a composition.
The following compositional elements are very important no matter the subject of the painting. They can be skillfully used to capture and guide the viewers’ eye within the picture:
- Shapes and how they are arranged
- The relative value of those shapes
- Lines and their direction
- Value contrast
- Color temperature and intensity
Examples of Composition Structures in Painting
An armature, or composition structure in a representational painting, is a structure that will determine the placement of the main masses in the painting and help guide the eye's movement through them.
The different kinds of compositions are characterized by the shapes and the sizes of the abstract value masses. Each design calls for a different layout of the light and the dark patterns.
In deciding which structure to use, you can combine more than one type of armature in the same painting.
Below are sketches of 13 common armatures in representational painting according to Edgar Alwin Payne.
- Balanced Scales
- O or Circular
- S or Compound Curve
- Pyramid or Triangle
- Radiating Lines
- Ell or Rectangular
- Suspended Steelyard
- Three Spots
- Group Mass
- Diagonal Line
Why Do We Use Armatures for Guidance in Painting?
The point of using armatures in a painting is to create a structure that will guide the placement of the major masses of your composition and how the eyes move through them. The armature you choose to use should somehow already exist in the interplay of the shapes and values of your subject.
All you have to do is to recognize it and sometimes apply small edits to push some characteristics and make it work while keeping it looking natural and not forced.
Before you begin to paint, plan your big shapes. Make sure that when you paint they keep their value and don’t break down in several smaller shapes with distracting details of different values.
Quote by the Author of "Mastering Composition"
If the arrangement of the big shapes is strong and coherent, it’ll carry the painting. You are 90 percent of the way toward achieving a composition – and consequently a painting – that will work.
— Ian Roberts
What Is the Value of a Color?
The value of a color is how dark or how light that color is. It is easy to see value shifts looking to an image in black and white or in grayscale; it is a little trickier to see it in color.
The best way to recognize differences in values is to squint. When you look at a scene squeezing your eyes and using your eyelashes as filters, small subtleties will disappear, and you'll be able to see bigger shapes of similar values.
In the preliminary phases of your planning, squint at your subject and notice the value structure.
Base your composition on a strong value structure. Make it stronger by exercising your creative license and tweak it to be more pleasing to the eye. You may exaggerate contrast or edit proportions or direction of masses for the sake of the painting.
Value Is the Most Important Element in a Painting
Some paintings show amazing drawing skills, good color mixing, great shape placement, but they are still not very successful.
Often times the problem lies in the value arrangement. If you squint at those paintings, the scene disappears in one single mass of the same value or appears as a confused camouflage of light and dark values without a planned layout and pattern.
This typically happens when the artist has not successfully created interest in value contrast and has not created a way for the viewer’s eye to move through the painting, following light through dark or dark through light.
The best way to plan a winning composition is by focusing on creating groupings of similar value and arranging in a visually pleasing way.
— Robie Benve
What Happens When You Squint
Squeeze your eyes just enough to be able to still see through your partly closed eyelids. As you do this, your eyelashes create a natural filter that allows less light to enter the pupils and dulls all colors.
Although squinting can make your subject a bit blurry, it helps you see beyond the details, and ignore small shifts in values and shapes.
You’ll notice that the shadows get darker and the highlights appear lighter, which, as a bonus, leads to more defined shapes.
By drawing or painting what you see while squinting, you’ll be able to simplify shapes and group the design into similar values.
Squint to See the Main Masses
The amount of information found in nature can be overwhelming. By squinting, you can see simplified shapes, and it’s easier to “see” the composition.
If you are choosing a subject to paint, and even squinting you can't see a potential composition made by a few simple masses, move on to something else.
How to Make Value Studies
The best approach to plan a successful painting is to create small, black and white value studies. All you need is a pencil, a pen, or gray markers, and some paper.
The goal is to create small designs that simplify and group similar values into bigger shapes. Aim to use no more than three values in your study: the white of the page will serve for the lights; then use a mid-gray and a black.
Make your value study small: 2”x3” or a similar scale. If you are going to use a specific canvas size, ensure that your thumbnails sides have the same proportions as your support.
A design that looks appealing in a rectangular thumbnail may be unpleasant if painted on a square canvas (and vice-versa).
Different value studies (thumbnails) of the same scene with slight variations on cropping, focal point, and/or light and dark patterns, will provide different options on how to design your painting.
You can create your own value scale, or you can buy one. They are quite inexpensive.
Keeping the Value Consistent When Adding Color
Once you have your design options and you pick your favorite one, it’s time to start painting on a support that is consistent in proportions with your value study.
The tricky part is usually mixing colors that are uniform in value with the original design. Make sure you squint a lot, keep comparing. After you mix each color, put a touchdown and test it against the adjacent colors.
Tip: To compare and identify values, keep comparing your color to a value scale. You can create your own or buy one. Many commercial value scale cards have handy holes that make determining values easier.
Some colors tend to trick our brains. For example, we see yellow=orange and we think “light”, but if we squint that yellow-orange might blend into a mid-value shape. Make an extra effort to keep the value of colors you use consistent with the value of the shape they belong to.
Example: sometimes a color may seem dark enough on the palette, but when we put it down, it looks much lighter than his neighbors and “breaks” the shape, disrupting the composition.
Advantages of Using a Mid Value Ground Color
Any color applied on a white canvas will look darker than it really is.
For this reason, many artists use a palette that has a mid-value gray.
It also helps to paint the canvas with a ground color and cover all the white. It is easier to see the value of a painted color when compared to a mid-value substrate (ground).
You can approach this in several ways:
- A. Cover your canvas with one ground color—when in doubt, use burnt sienna.
- B. Use two different ground colors: a warm hue for the light areas, a cool one for the shadow areas.
- C. Cover your canvas with several colors, applied in an abstract way.
B makes easier to see if the color we mixed to fill a shape is really belonging to that value group.
This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.
© 2017 Robie Benve
Robie Benve (author) from Ohio on January 08, 2019:
Hi Jai, you are very welcome. Thanks for the suggestion about the "all about values" article topic. Check this article out, it may be close to what you are asking for.
Jai on January 08, 2019:
Many thanks for your lovely tips...If possible can you please create an article on just identifying, creating or anything about VALUES...I'm still struggling with it
Sooz on August 17, 2018:
Thanks for the refresher on composition and value. Keeping these things in mind before I start painting helps my flow- if I get off track I have my original composition to go back too.
Gracie L Sprouse from Virginia on January 31, 2017:
Thanks for sharing your expertise, I really appreciate it. I'll have to come back and read again to make sure I didn't miss anything.