A Good Composition Acts as Strong Armature for the Painting

A Good Composition Acts as 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 makes the piece strong and interesting for the viewer.

While most artists have great visual taste and can often recognize a good composition almost immediately, just from instinct and visual preferences, an effective design is rarely achieved just from instinct and improvisation. Typically it 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 making 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
• Relative value of those shapes
• Lines and their direction
• Value contrast
• Color temperature and intensity

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 eight of the common armatures in representational painting:

1. S shape
2. L shape
3. Diagonal
4. Triangle
5. Radiating lines
6. Fulcrum
7. O shape
8. Cruciform

Composition Armatures in Painting

Link :

https://feltmagnet.com/painting/Value-Pattern-Painting-Composition

Kebon Jeruk  March 13 2019