Mastering Composition: Techniques and Principles to Dramatically Improve Your Painting

Create Better Compositions by Design

The path to better painting begins with Mastering Composition. This effective guide blends clear, visual instruction with 5 step-by-step demonstrations to show you how to plan and paint your best work yet.

Composition is the key, and here you'll learn to design paintings with new skill and confidence. It all begins with the armature or structure of the picture plane. Every great painting has one, and you'll see through several famous examples exactly how the Old Masters used armatures to create movement, narrative, harmony and fluidity. Based on these examples, you'll practice what you've learned following a series of hands-on demonstrations.

Once you understand the basic principles of design, you'll be amazed at how quickly and effectively your compositions come together. Soon you will be painting more boldly and confidently than ever before with less reworking and overworking.

Whether you're a beginner looking for basic instruction or a more advanced painter troubleshooting a specific problem, the proven methods in this book will work for you. Ideal for all mediums, Mastering Composition gives you the knowledge you need to create powerful paintings out of every subject.

The principles in this book apply to all art instruction readers (beginning and experienced). Better design = better painting. Following the principles in this book will eliminate repainting, overworking and frustration by creating harmonious, unified, powerful paintings.

Works for all art mediums: Fundamental compositional principles apply whether the person paints in watercolor, pastel, acrylic or oil, painting still life, landscapes or figures.

Contains a bonus 15 minute DVD that shows how altering one element of a painting can change the entire composition.

Author is an experienced international workshop instructor with a captivating voice, able to convey this often-thought complex subject in terms everyone can understand. He makes it easy, interesting and educational.

All elements of composition are covered. Readers will learn how to use a viewfinder to determine cropping and framing to create the best relationship of value masses. They will also learn to analyze paintings in terms of color shapes of value, hue, and intensity (also color temperature)-the elements that make a painting. Roberts uses master works as examples to show how the eye moves through a painting. He will include before/after examples to illustrate how using the rules for good composition can improve paintings. Readers will learn how to create compositionally successful paintings through 6-8 demonstrations.

Ian Roberts has been painting for over 40 years. His father was a painter and Ian accompanied him on painting trips from the time he was ten. He attended the New School of Art and the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. He studied figure painting in Florence, Italy. He has taught plein air painting in Provence, France and Tuscany, Italy, as well as in the U.S. through his school Atelier Saint-Luc, named after the patron saint of painters. Ian shows in the U.S. and Canada, is an artist member of the California Art Club and a signature member of the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association. He is the author of the book, Creative Authenticity, and created two videos, Mastering Composition and Plein Air Painting. He is a popular workshop instructor specializing in composition. He lives on Georgian Bay in Ontario Canada.