Not all Youtube art videos feel like clickbait to me. For example, Ian Roberts’ One Simple Compositional Structure to Improve Your Paintings feels nicely straightforward: it contains a specific tip! In case you’d rather read than watch, Roberts suggests this structure for organizing the composition of a landscape painting:
The center of interest is at the intersection of the strongest horizontal and vertical lines.
Landscapes naturally have horizontals (e.g. the horizon), so when Roberts goes out plein air painting, he looks for a strong vertical element to give his scene that structure. The vertical does not need to be a straight line; it could be something like a tree or a curved path. Vertical elements break up the monotony of horizontals and can provide an important role in creating depth.
Other good tips from the video:
- Allow the vertical element to break across the horizontal(s) so that the scene doesn’t divide into unrelated sections.
- You don’t need to find something interesting; you can create a “center of interest” by the way you paint. The “center of interest” does not need to be a specific representational thing, it can be an area of high contrast or a flash of color.
When I have (inadvertently) used it… or not
I went back over some of my recent art and judged whether it used Roberts’ rule or not.
The trees are strong vertical elements. I feel that maybe the two trees on either side are in competition. The grasses at the bottom of the left tree are at the intersection, but they’re not really emphasized.
There is a strong vertical element – the light pole – but there’s nothing special really at the intersections where it meets the horizontal ground, roof line, or wires.
Deliberately trying to use it
Here is some art I created after learning about the rule where I at least somewhat had it in mind.
Lots of verticals here, maybe too many. I tried to put a “center of interest” where the path meets the horizon by dropping in some scarle,t but I think I was too random and heavy-handed with it.
I deliberately tried to create a “center of interest” where the vertical path meets the horizon, by means of increasing contrast and using a pop of bright blue that’s nowhere else.
Special attention is paid to using the clouds as verticals pointing at the lightest area of the sky.
Conclusion
I think “include a vertical” can be a useful guideline to keep in mind because it’s an antidote to the “bands of color” style that so many landscapes fall into, which can be boring. For example, many of my landscapes only really have horizontal elements, or at best slight curves, such as this hillside under horizontal clouds.
As simple as the idea is, I found it more difficult than I expected to implement. Including a vertical is easy enough, but how do I emphasize, or create, a center of interest at the intersection? And should I? I feel like creating a specific “center of interest” is not something I always want to do. In many cases, I want to create a more general sense of depth.
Still, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that “leading lines” will naturally draw the eye to the intersection, so there could be good synergy in using that – not fighting it!
It’s also worth keeping in mind that, like all compositional rules, this is more of a tool: it’s one option for how to organize the elements on the page, but it’s not the only way.Looking around at the art on my wall – art not by me, that I have chosen merely because I like it – maybe one in five seems to follow this rule.
What makes Roberts’ rule potentially useful is not its universality, then, but the relative ease of applying it in the field. You don’t need to measure anything; you don’t need a viewfinder or a Golden Mean stencil. I can’t be sure I will find something interesting in the field, but I can generally find a vertical.