The Importance of Composition

I would argue that composition is one of the most important steps in creating a drawing. Just as a good essay is based on a good outline, so too is a drawing on its basic composition; the structure has to be right, or the shading and effects applied afterward will be meaningless.

Composition can best be described as the overarching shape and spacing of an drawing. It is not a finished image, but rather a part of a finished image.

Figuring Out the Composition

Composition should be established before any other process. It involves laying down loose lines that can be corrected if misplaced and whittled into the proper shape with further work. I always recommend starting from loose, almost careless lines, because they allow you to experiment before you commit to the final look of your drawing. Then, once you have settled on the basic shape of your image, you can start working on cutting in more and more detail — again working from large to small, broad to minute. I would also argue that this step should take up a large part of your time drawing, if not more than half of it. Ultimately, this is the most difficult part of drawing, because this is where you make decisions about perspective and shape.

Examples of Poor Composition

I thought about creating a new drawing for the purpose of this post but was met with two dilemma: I didn’t want to spend several hours working on a piece that would ultimately not look good (who does?), and I wasn’t sure the example I came up with would sufficiently demonstrate my point. After all, you can create a good image without first considering the composition — it’s just unlikely. Instead, I decided to use two of my own, finished pieces that I already know suffer from poor composition.

 Can be found on my DeviantArt page, here.

This is a piece I named “Vulture.” I believe it is currently my most popular drawing. It might have something to do with the crispness and color of the ballpoint pen versus the comparatively grainy look of graphite.

The first, most glaring issue with the composition of this piece is its lack of a background. This is actually a symptom of the lack of composition, and not necessarily my choice as an artist. Of course, a lack of a background is not always a problem in art, but here I felt that it was — I would have rather hinted at an arid scene with little shafts of grass poking out from between the cracks in otherwise the lifeless soil. I couldn’t add this, because the perspective of the image did not lend itself to an appealing ground plane. Without deciding upon the perspective first, I instead ended up with the vulture angled away from the camera where I would have preferred it had been turned to face it directly (the idea was that it could be guiding something to the right).

Can be found on my DeviantArt page, here.

This is a piece I named “Water Feature.” It features a gargoyle overlooking an abandoned cemetery. Fun fact about gargoyles: the term only technically applies to statues with spouts meant to serve as outlets for water; when these figures are only statues, they are referred to as “grotesques.” In any case, I spent a long time — as I usually do with these kinds of drawings — working on this piece. It took about twelve hours over the course of several months (I worked on it during my lunch breaks) to complete, and during that time the composition really began to bother me.

Again, I started with the gargoyle, and not the basic shape of the overall scene. This caused the perspective to fall apart once I did finally decide to add in a background (something I have been challenging myself to do, lately). The land is supposed to be below the gargoyle by tens of feet, but the perspective on the tombstones does not indicate this. Instead, I should have had the tombstone appear at a more downward angle, instead of head-on. Or, if I had decided to bring the graveyard up to the level of the gargoyle (to indicate that it was perhaps set atop a low-sitting crypt), it would have looked something like this:

I think that sits a bit more nicely.

Leaving the graveyard where it was and at the angle that it was, I created a huge gap in the image in which I couldn’t sensibly work with — the perspective of anything in this region would either have been tiny or invisible.

Or, you could say it's a really steep hill.  I'm not really sure.

This is what upset me most about drawing this picture. I had worked myself into a corner, when just a few more sessions of working out the composition could have lead to a more intricate scene.  I hope this post spares you from the same disappointment.