The Three Components of a Strong Composition
How you can implement these elements to make your work feel more complete.
Throughout six years of curating artwork for Composition, the most heartbreaking thing to me is when I see a technically skilled artist who has the ability down, but they fumble the most important part: the composition (very meta, I know). This foundation is the difference between your work gathering dust in a drawer versus finally getting accepted to present your work at the gallery you have been submitting to for the past three years.
With that being said, I’m going to outline the three core principles that all strong compositions maintain (in terms of an image). This is what I have seen after critically analyzing hundreds of thousands of pieces of art over my lifetime.
Alignment
Literally, just keep things straight. If you’ve ever looked at a piece and something about it feels ‘off’ but you can’t pinpoint why, chances are it’s because it’s not straight enough. In practice, this looks like turning on the grid view on the viewfinder of an iPhone camera and seeing where the natural lines of what you are trying to capture fall. Then, adjusting the positioning of either yourself or the camera accordingly. Another way you can use the grid as a guide is by turning on grid lines when designing a graphic in Photoshop or sketching a rough grid in pencil on a canvas before painting. It’s not that every line has to be perfectly straight, but if you were to place a grid over any image, a painting, a photo, or a graphic, you would be able to see where the structure underneath becomes visible. There will be proportional balance across the frame. To the untrained eye, this goes completely unnoticed, but to the master, this is second nature.
Here, the grid is used to center the cross in the middle, and it shows the balance of the density of the background characters on each side.
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