What is composition? Composition, at its core, is decision making about relationships. Is your canvas ratio 3:2? Will that be divided in half equally with light and dark? Will half of that dark area be warm, and the rest of the canvas cool? Each of these choices is composition! Overly rigid formulas using math is not a great way to learn composition, because it does not lead to listening and trusting yourself. Composition is design, and design is intuitive. Theory is just a possible explanation as to why something works, not a rule or a process.

Drawing tip: don't look at the thing you are drawing!
This might seem counter intuitive at first, but if you look, take a second to memorize, look away, and then draw, you will get a lot more accuracy *and* train your visual memory too
Try drawing something completely behind you! Take a look at this photo of Sorolla painting, he would have had to turn his head to the side to see his subject. Painters of the past did not always put their canvases right next to the subject so that they could see both in one field of vision

Thread on finishing paintings! What does it mean to finish or detail a painting? What does the word rendering even mean? Here's a thread on 3 different strategies for finishing work, when to know that it is "done," and the pitfalls we might encounter along the way. Here’s one of my sketches compared to the finished version. They look very similar when viewed small. I’m trying to solve the biggest problems first, loose but accurately. By focusing on the big picture, the details will relate to the whole and not distract and weaken the picture

Let's talk about one of my favorite paintings and some of the reasons why I think that it works so well: a thread on detail, edges, gesture, composition, and shape design. Notice how all of the detail in the painting is grouped into two main areas, an big area of complexity and interest, and a simple area to contrast and "activate" the complexity. If everything is detailed, then nothing is.

My new tutorial is on sale for today only! I'll also pick one random retweet to give it to for free, and if you already picked it up I'll refund the cost! Use this link to get the discount:
gumroad.com/l/advancedbasi… This tutorial goes over the mental side of art, my detailed process, how to study in a sustainable way, as well as all of the fundamentals needed to confidently understand painting

Are diagrams like these bad for artists? Will they restrict creativity and and instill a bunch of rules of composition that you have to follow? Are the lines and shapes completely made up? What if I don't get it? A thread. 🧵 Will they restrict creativity? No, not as long as you know what they are for. Take music theory, it is great at analyzing how a Mozart symphony works, but it does not work at all as a step by step guide to writing an amazing piece of music.

Take a look at these materials painted by Josep Serrasanta and John Sargent, and imagine how different they would look if it was a render from a 3D program. A render with perfectly accurate materials does not guarantee an interesting image, and the same applies for painting... Its only when a scientific knowledge of how light reacts with materials is combined with an understanding of how to compress value based on what we see that this information can turn into simple building blocks that we can use to compose a picture.

Thread on composition! It's not about math formulas or memorizing golden ratios. Contrast provides focal points, and you can arrange these in various ways to create different feelings. Some arrangements create very reliable effects, and you can add these tools to your toolbox! Let’s take a look at the compositions of Dean Cornwell. One of the most common tools is using a symmetrical triangle arrangement of focal points to convey stability. This first image conveys a stalemate or delicate balance of power with an inverted triangle...

New thread on values! What does pixel art have to do with value grouping in painting? It’s all down to a concept I call *dithering*. We are naturally very good at seeing small differences, and this is not helpful for painting, because we need to see differences *between* things. Have you ever done a study of a painting and found yourself zooming in, only to zoom out and find that it was only getting worse? This is because of focusing on small differences too early. How do we even get started with all of these patterns and materials here?

Tip about highlights in painting and drawing! Highlights show structure in the lit side of an object, and they are just as useful as shadows for showing form. Highlights like to hang out in corners because there are a lot of angle changes there, and therefore more chances for the light to be reflected back to your eye.

Thread on values! Have you ever had to rely on tweaking levels in Photoshop in order to get your painting to have enough contrast? Here’s how to confidently control values from the very beginning! Values (and color, and edges, and drawing) are all about relationships. Let’s use this scene as an example. The cloud definitely reads against the sky, but it is just a temperature change, not a value change. We want to look for the big similarities and differences first.

Some thoughts on art block, anxiety, and why ups and downs in artistic output are a natural part of being an artist. Art is an emotional pursuit, and communicating emotional ideas to others is what makes art so powerful. 1/5 If we were perfect robots, then we wouldn't have feelings and emotional ideas to communicate to others, or at least they wouldn't be very interesting. 2/5

Two important concepts to know for improving in art:

1. Art and painting is a language
2. We only improve at what we do

(cont., 1/5) A language is used for communicating ideas, if you are a student only doing homework assignments then communicating your own ideas is something that is never practiced. It is the same with only doing studies, it's like reading the dictionary in order to learn to speak a language.

Thread on how to do composition studies! The secret is to look for the big relationships. We are not painting objects, but rather designing an abstract composition that has the feeling we want. Zoom way out, look for big value shapes, and compare across the whole painting! After we have our black and white study, then add temperature information on top. Don’t use layer modes like color or overlay, but rather paint directly and opaquely right on top. This will help us gain an understanding of how color relates to value.

Thread on color part 3! We've gone over a lot of the science, but how do we use all of this creatively in our paintings? How do we make a black and white image look natural? The secret and key to the whole thing is in a property of color called Chroma. Chroma is distinct from, but related to, saturation. You can have a highly saturated yellow hue at a dark value. This would mean that it is a pure color, but at a low intensity. That color is not high chroma, because it appears brown and not what we would describe as yellow.

Thread on color in painting part 2! How do we know how to confidently decide on colors in the infinite lighting situations that we can imagine? We’re going to dive deeper this time into how light works, and what determines the color we actually see when light reaches our eyes. First, materials. They all reflect the scene, just differently. Diffuse materials absorb/scatter some wavelengths beneath the surface while reflecting the rest, some metals reflect all of the light, and others are colored due to uneven absorption and emission by their electrons.

Thread on color in painting! This will be a 3-part series with everything you ever wanted to know about color. What actually is color, and how do we use it? How come it is so hard to make a painting look natural if we start in black and white and then add color after? Let’s start at the beginning with the basics in this thread. First, color is a 3D space that you could imagine yourself walking around in. We know this because there are 3 variables. If we plot only 2 of them, for example value and saturation, we can easily see that this is 2D.

I wanted to talk about inspiration and daily practice! Here is a thread of a few of my daily sketches from the past couple of weeks. Daily practice is important to keep up what I call a continuity, a narrative that evolves over time naturally with our interests. By working every day, this narrative can take us places that we wouldn't have expected. By following this thread sincerely and without judgment, our work can take on a really interesting and personal quality.

Thread on drawing in art! If drawing conjures images of line art, pencils, and sketchbooks, try thinking of it in a broader way. When I redefined this term for myself, it gave me a much clearer idea of how to study art and allowed real breakthroughs to happen while practicing. Drawing has nothing to do with any particular medium or style, so when we practice our drawing, we are practicing all of the topics that fall under that umbrella: perspective, anatomy, structure, how light falls on a subject, the value of each plane in relation to the light, etc.

Thread on shadows in painting! Have you ever noticed that darkest part of the shadow right before the reflected light? That’s called the core shadow. Why do they happen, and are they a part of every shadow? I remember being very confused about core shadows - often I’d not be able to see them at all. I’d paint them in and it would look wrong and I wouldn’t know why. They are a useful tool to show form, but they happen under specific circumstances. Where are the core shadows here?

Thread on edges in painting! Hierarchies of value and color in our paintings are so important and a hierarchy of edges adds a whole other dimension. Edges are particularly fun because we can use a mental checklist to sort out which should be hard, soft, and everything in between: 1. Where very similar values meet, it feels like a soft edge, and this can be accentuated to what is known as a “lost edge.” Edges are strongly related to value! Notice in this Sargent how the dark values get lost into the shadow entirely and how the arm gets lost into the torso.