Centuries ago, only the most dedicated professionals - or those with money and time to spare in abundance - used oil paints. Until the nineteenth century, if you wanted to develop your oil painting techniques, you first had to mix your own paints.
This meant acquiring the basic pigments and then laboriously grinding them down to a powder, before mixing with oils and other additives. Incidentally, that's why, even today, colors with names like umber, ultramarine and ochre are still used, as are terms like 'earth colors'.
They were and are still made from natural products found in the ground. It was only about 150 years ago that oil paints became available in tubes, for the first time making it feasible for the keen amateur to indulge themselves in this wonderful pastime.
Paintings have underlying principles that organize the elements of the picture in order to bring the eye of the viewer into and around the image in an interesting way and to organize the elements into a cohesive whole.
There are nearly infinite ways to structure a picture. Some are obvious, like a mother arching over and protecting a resting or sleeping horizontal child. Another obvious composition is the opposing angles of two fighters in a boxing match.
Some of the principles of composition:
o Beauty is organized variety.
o Variety equals interest.
o A picture needs a dominant element, a sub-dominant element and subordinate elements organized into interesting relationships. This creates order for the viewer so that you, the painter, can entertain the eye of the viewer with a varied and therefore interesting picture order.
o The dominant element can be made dominant by a somewhat central position, by size dominance or interest dominance, and through the complexity of the dominant element or its psychological dominance. For instance, the eye of a viewer is drawn to a human face.
o Those elements need to be varied in size and shape for maximum interest.
o The viewer needs to have a path to those elements that is interesting.
o Thumbnails ... small sketches ... can organize your picture before you get into the details.
o The negative areas (spaces between objects) are as important as the objects.
o The center of the picture is the most powerful ... not the exact center ... but the area around the center is where your dominant element gains strength.
o Tension between two elements adds interest (like the opposition thrust of the fighters mentioned above).
o Division horizontally suggests peacefulness.
o Those divisions should not be equal as that would create a boring picture.
o In a painting of a sky, mountain range and valley let's say you want the sky to dominate. You would make the sky ½ the height of the canvas (3/6ths). But a linear (3-2-1) stacking would be boring. 3-1-2 is more interesting. So sky 3, mountain range 1 and foreground valley 2.
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