Composition and Simplification

Our Wednesday. June 8th Dupont class lecture  with Caroline Marsland covered composition and simplification. It was an excellent class for all levels of artist. Some of the main points she covered were as followed:

Decide early on what it is you wish to express in your picture and centre your design around this.

Paint with large brushes using large shapes,

Give yourself a time deadline to paint to,

Do several thumbnail sketches first,

Feel free to move or add objects in the picture to improve your design,

Our eye is always drawn to a human figure in a picture.

Tissot was used as an example of a great artist who was the master of simplification so if possible, study some of his paintings.

Caroline used a photo of the familiar seven sisters  where she moved objects around to create a good composition. The photo below showed the result of this. IMG_2161 IMG_2162 IMG_2165