Composition-A-Day sketchbook

[meat]

The frequent cropping and thumb nailing is helping me getting ideas out and getting used to thumb nailing. I'm hoping to dig more usefulness out of this exercise by trying more different things out.

[Hobitt]

Playing around with negative and positive shapes and all that stuff.

[Lyraina]

...so much for posting here daily! Here's the last pages:

[Lyraina]

...quality is dropping... was rather tired while doing these... last page is master studies instead of from life.

[MerryG]

This challenge sounds Amazing. I've been thinking lately, "I need to get better at composition, but I never know what to draw for that" (because in my mind, composition means a 'real' piece). But little thumb sketches every day?! Why have I not thought of this before?! You beautiful person, you!

If it's still cool to join the forum, I'd love to. If not, I'll just keep my thumbnails to myself and thank you for the idea and inspiration!

Thanks,
Merry

[Lyraina]

Merry, of course you can still join! Feel free to post your dailies here :)

[Lyraina]

running out of corners of conveniently draw-able corners of the garden... might have to actually go our a few meters to get new compositions!

[Adam Lina]

Here I'll flood your thread with my junk.

[Lyraina]

Adam Lina, wow, these are cool!!

[dodeqaa]

Theres studies are great guys! :)

[meat]

Adam, great to see traditional studies! 

Oh Lyra, you been owning this exercise way better than I have!

I got that book back from the library, and the author strongly recommends using a view finder for studying composition. To get a view finder, get a piece of thick paper like one side of a shoe box or orange box or a regular amazon.com box, measure out some rectangle or square, then cut it out with a blade. Not to give myself excuses, but it's been real hard to fight fatigue after work and do work like study and draw. Here is the only 1 drawing that represents a composition instead of a sketch of an object on table....

[Lyraina]

meat: interesting that the author recommends using a viewfinder. I’ve been torn between „it makes it so much easier“ and „does this make the exercise less useful?“. But I’m still not feeling like this is doing anything for composition - I’m just using my photographer’s eye for drawing, that’s all. But it’s a good habit to do some sketching from life daily.

By now someone can probably locate my house by mapping all these trees and houses I've been drawing...

[meat]

Yeah I agree... composition is such an elusive thing to study... but this is at least a good framework to do daily sketches in. If I can just get my ass up 1 hour earlier to fit them all in!

[dodeqaa]

LAUNCH OUTTA BED!!!!! BOOM LIKE A SHOOTING STAHHHHH!!!!!

[meat]

study.. of ... a magazine... photo...

[Lyraina]

I got a bit lazy with scanning :(

[Adam Lina]

Can I post portrait comps? Oh well. Doing it.

[Zearthus]

The object eventually became a bit too dull, because lets face it, just drawing real life objects eventually gets flat our boring. So will this group continue to mainly focus on still life composition, or there will be some switch ups?

[Lyraina]

I believe there's value in not dropping an exercise after a couple of days just because the initial excitement is gone - pushing further despite that is an important skill too. Try making it interesting *despite* having done it for a while, just like doing many thumbnail sketches for a painting will force you to come up with different ideas than the most obvious ones. There's this guy who practiced composition by re-drawing and tracing the same composition over and over again, and I think he also did lots of drawings of the same subject, changing and improving it a bit each day: http://www.learning-to-see.co.uk/dow-three-c (If you're curious, you have to go digging a bit, I forgot where he posted about that)

That said, you're free to adjust the rules to your liking - or at least, I don't mind at all :) This challenge is not to annoy anyone, just to keep people motivated to work on their skills. I.e. I count pure observational (i.e. landscape) paintings as composition as well, not just desktop object. When I'm too busy with other things some days, I allow myself to throw in some master studies as well. Just do what works for you and what helps you learn what you want to learn :) That's what it is all about.

[Zearthus]

@Lyraina
I already know of his blog/articles. Originally that's where I learned couple of things to do in regards to consistent practice/deliberate practice.

But I truly believe, not everyone, has the ability (which takes time to cultivate) to repeat the same object, over and over again, for consecutive weeks. It just goes to a point where you start wanting to vary the subject you're learning a bit. Because our mind eventually gets bored of repeating the same thing. Unless you can turn it into a meditative experience, which is of course one of the mileage I'm aiming for.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I will definitely get back to this before this week ends, need to figure out how to make it more fun first.


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EDIT:

I'm kind of curious, everyone is doing their own thing, but are you all really practicing compositions, as in using a source to learn from, or just doing this arranging things on your own, without some sort of source to pull from?

For example book such as: Composition by Arthur Wesley Dow