Visual Composition

Composition is basically the layout of the image, deciding what is the most important part and organsising everything else accordingly

I guess its like, when youre taking a picture, you always aim to get ‘everything’ in and generally stand to where would be the most effective viewpoint.

Pieces of work representing good composition use all forms of technique, manipulating the image through use of lines and shape, colour, tone and space.

Using the Rule of Thirds is a good basis in creating good composition. The method involves splitting the canvas into 9 equal parts and dividing the subjects into them. It’s said to create more interest in the elements rather than world itself.

Composition is important, it’s something we have to consider as artists in both the 2d and 3d world. In a painting the artist has to create the layout of the painting from a single fixed viewpoint.

A particular fine art piece I like comes from Joseph Wright of Derby, traditionally a Chiaroscuro artist, painting both landscape and portraits.

The’ Vesuvius from Posillipo’ shows excellent use of compositional elements. Looking at this now I can actually see the rule of thirdsbeing used. The white of the clouds are separated from the red of the volcano, by the moonlight illuminating the night’s sky. This battle is then reflected down into the ocean broken up by landscape eventually leading to the silloheute of the ship.

The balance between light and dark really creates quite a haunting image. I find the use of red in this image interesting, although it is illuminate, it’s almost shielded underneath the dark plooms of smoke contrasted against the true light from the clouds.

Composition in paintings is tough to get right, and it doesn’t normally happen by chance.

However in the three dimensional world, the artist now has to organise the scene from every angle possible so that no matter where the player is standing in the world, the environment is always pleasing on the eye.

Quite a task id imagine.

I think its only from the most recent trash project that I’ve really started thinking about composition. Id always move the camera to a suitable spot and adjust the lighting for renders, but with this project was different due to modelling lots of different assets in one scene. I ultimately decided by creating 10 different trash scenes and picking the one that looked the best.

This method worked fine for a 500 poly trash scene, but it would take faaaaaaaar too much time to do this for a large environment (which is why planning and concepting is so important ! ! haha )

There are ways of getting around this problem. ‘Blocking out’ objects and landscape, adjusting them to get a feel for the scene.

This is particularly useful in creating cityscapes. Well this is what ive been told. Ive never actually done it before so ill think ill do one now to prove my point haha

So this is 20 minutes spontaneous work, but if you have an aim or a theme in mind it’s a good way to get a gist of the layout of the scene with a three dimensional perspective. This ones better than mine.