 Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. We're gonna have some fun today and if you're new here, please subscribe and hit that little bell icon to be notified of future videos. Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins and today I'm bringing Monet Cafe a video that I also include on my Patreon page. On Wednesdays we have something called Storytime where I read from different artists books and we learn a whole lot and this particular session in Storytime is on composition. So while I will only be reading the portions in the book to my patrons, I thought I'd go ahead and give the general lesson on composition to everyone. So enjoy this. It should be kind of short and sweet and composition is such a core principle to good art. So I think it's foundational and I think you'll like it. Alright, here we go. Now here's a little trick to composing a nice design or composition for your reference image, whether you're working from a reference image or from life. I find this really helps if you're working from life. If you're outdoors and you're about to take a photo or start a painting, sometimes it's a good idea to kind of get an idea of where you want things to be because it's a real big wide world. I find that if you just put up an easel, if you're outdoors painting and you're just looking at things, sometimes there's just too much to see. And so this is a neat little trick. I basically just took a mat. You could do this with just two pieces of cardboard that you cut, but I took a mat that was already together. How was it? Let's see. It was like this. And I just cut it there and there. Okay. So it was a mat for framing a piece of artwork or matting a piece of artwork. And after you cut it, it makes a nice little adjustable frame for composing things. You may want to do a subject matter that's horizontal, I mean vertical and tall, horizontal and wide. You may want to make it square. But the neat thing is you can hold it up to your subject matter and get an idea of a composition. So sometimes things like this really help and they kind of give you creative ideas. I actually really like compositions like that. All right. So that's just a neat little tool that you can do. You can also do it with your phone with reference images. Now I use my phone features a lot. So I can go into my regular editing app for my photos. I have an iPhone and I can choose to crop it. And you can crop it in different ways and look at different things of your reference photo that might make neat compositions. And so I use that feature a lot. And I think most phones have that cropping feature. If they don't, you can get free apps that do. So you can do things like that in your phone or you can do it in real life as well. Real quickly, I thought I'd show you how I edit photos in my iPhone. I basically go to edit. I choose that little crop icon there and then notice how it immediately gives you a third, divisions, horizontally and vertically. So what I did is I put my face in the upper left-hand third and it definitely makes a better composition than if it was in the middle. And I kind of automatically do this anyway. The more you do it, the more it becomes kind of natural when I even compose photos and when I paint. So that's a quick little way to do that. And now we're going to talk about it a little more. All right. So the next thing is what makes a good composition? What do I put in? Do I put it in the center? Do I put it to the side? What am I supposed to center and focus on in my composition that I want to paint? Oh, this tea is so good. Hang on one second. Station break. All right. So we see a beautiful scene or beautiful reference photo and we know what excites us about that reference photo. But how do I know if it's a good composition? Often these things are kind of natural. And I find it's very interesting that a lot of people who are not artists can pretty easily pick out good art. And I think it's because it's kind of within us to know what feels right. There are things, it's just like in music, something sound chaotic and something sound harmonious. So I think it is kind of God-given thing that we have. But we can learn these rules to get better at it. So we are looking at our scene and there's some beauty that we see. But where's the best place to put it? Well, there's some general rules that we can do. These are very simple rules. And fortunately, they are pretty simple. I mean, we can get to some really complex composition strategies. But I find keeping it simple is often the best. So let's talk about the rule of thirds. I have videos on this, the golden ratio. I'm not gonna go into all this right now. I'll put the video links in the about section so you can check out these. They're just fascinating. It's so cool. And focal point. Okay, so we want to take the thing that excited us about the scene to begin with. Something probably caused you to go, oh, look at that. Where do we want to put that? Or how do we want to arrange that? Well, let's just talk about the general rules of composition first. Now, I was interesting because in the book that I was reading, it was one particular way of distinguishing thirds. There's something about thirds. What is it about thirds? I find it very now I'm going to go in a tangent here. I'm sorry. It's my channel, right? There's something interesting about thirds. If you could break down all of anything that exists into its basic forms, we would have time, space, and matter. Now it's interesting. You can't break anything down further than that. Now each of those interestingly can be broken down into thirds. Think about time, past, present, and future. That's interesting. Think about space, height, breadth, and depth. All right? Think about matter, solid, liquid, and gas. There's just something about thirds. Really interesting. And it applies also to composition and rules really artistically. And I find it quite interesting that our universe is a design based on our creator, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So now in the book that I was reading for our story time on my Patreon page, they had a different technique, but I'm going to keep it simple here and use the one that I think is pretty common to most people. Let me just draw out a format. By the way, I have an old video. One of my first videos was on composition because that's how important I think it is. And so it's probably about time I did another one. Now once again, about thirds, okay, there's something about the number three. So what we will do is we will divide our frame into thirds, both vertically and horizontally. So now the best place typically, these are just basic rules to put a focal point is in these intersections of your third lines. Okay, so where they intersect. So here, here, here, and here. All right. And I'm going to give just a couple examples of points that are not done this way. And I think you can probably pretty quickly see that they don't feel right. They just don't feel right. It's like I was saying, this is kind of a natural, natural thing that we have. So let's say we just split it in half. Okay, I'm going to do these real life. All right. And now let's say we have a scene of a sailboat on the water. All right, and we're like, typically, I think kids and when we don't have a lot of skills with photography, we typically put it smack that in the center of the painting. Okay, so we've got our sailboat. There it is right there in the center. And we've got some water on the center horizon line. And all of a sudden, this painting becomes really boring. There's not a lot of interest. There's nothing that pulls you in. It's just right there in the middle versus if we were to put our sailboat, I should do another one, but I won't. We'll put our sailboat boat in this bottom third with the mast up here. And the water is now in the bottom third. All right, and we might have some clouds up in here, giving us some interest, drawing our eye. Do I really have an art channel? Look at this. This is terrible. All right, so we've got a little more interest. This is more interesting definitely than this. It looks like these clouds have eyes. All right. So I mean, and you'll instantly see how boring it would look. What if we had clouds on either side of the boat? Okay, all of a sudden, that's just become like bookends. All right. Definitely more interesting to have our focal points in the third rather than a halfway. Let's do a couple of concepts with like a landscape, you know, because I do a lot of landscape. All right, so let's say we're just doing a landscape scene. And you know, I can't help it. I gotta add some color to the mix. So bye bye marker. All right, so what I'm going to do here is let's talk about a landscape scene where we have a tree, a mountain, maybe a stream, and how would we arrange that? Now, I'm working from imagination, but you know, often you'll be working from a reference photo or from real life. So where do we put that tree? Where do we put that stream or that road or that mountain? And again, let's follow the concept of thirds. So first, let me just go ahead and get in a general idea for Bank of Trees, you know, kind of somewhere upper third, kind of in the background. I'm speeding this portion up and it's really not very long anyway, but I'll give you some music for your listening pleasure and I'll be back with the lesson in just a second. Now let's consider using the same concept in a way that doesn't use the rule of thirds. So first, what we'll do is we're gonna put our trees right here in the middle. Oh, let's do it more like in here. I'm gonna not totally make this some as stark as this example. Okay, we'll put a little bit over here and a little bit here. We've got them in the middle. Okay, and now let's do our waterway just kind of coming up straight in the middle here maybe. Now let's do our mountain. Let's make the peak of it kind of right in the middle and then trailing maybe off to the side a little bit. Now like my last video I did on newsprint, neither of these are masterpieces by any means, but the concept is that hopefully you see this one is more interesting than this one with the composition right in the middle. This mountain, even the center peak of the mountain is right in the middle. The waterway comes right in from the sides in the middle, whereas this is much more interesting and I think visually pleasing even for the non artist, I feel that this third concept really does resonate with our spirits better than this. So we see we have an upper third for the horizon line. Okay, where the land meets what would be the sky if the mountain wasn't there. Okay, we've got this waterway coming in and diagonally kind of cutting into an end point where it's like almost at a third close anyway. It's not halfway. We have it coming in not at a center point, but almost a third of the way this curve is right here. We've got the trees coming over to about two thirds and then we've got a little third section kind of of trees back here. Our mountain is even coming over and ending almost at a two third point. So a lot more interest than if we split things up more bisecting things in other words, horizontally and vertically. Here's a little bit more of a close up to help you perhaps I think instinctually you will feel that the first one is definitely more pleasing than the second one. And while this may seem a bit elementary or perhaps beginner, I am trying to give more content for the beginner. It is such a crucial element to good art. Now we just talked here about positioning with composition, meaning thirds where to place things. There are other elements and without this video getting too long, let me direct you to another video that I believe has other elements that are crucial and awesome for creating those focal points. The first video I recommend is five ways to create a focal point in art. In this video, I take you through five different focal point strategies that have been used by master artists for years and continue to be used today. The next video I recommend is the golden ratio art, beauty and the grand design. Now this one to me is fascinating. I am fascinated by how nature reflects patterns in design, also known as the Fibonacci sequence. And we as artists emulate those patterns to create beauty of our own. Once again, links to these videos will be in the about section of this video. Hey, I love bringing you anything that I think can help especially the beginners. And hopefully this was something that will take you further in your artistic endeavors. Alright guys, have a great day. Bye. Also called the Fibonacci sequence and the golden