COMPOSITION

Don't make dull, static compositions! WHAT MAKES A COMPOSITION DULL? When you make all objects about the same size or you place them where they divide your picture in half. When you have too many straight lines, and when you make everything in the picture the same tone value, you have dull compositions. YOU WANT DYNAMIC MOVEMENT in your pictures. You want lines, shapes, spaces and tones to have movement. By movement I DON'T MEAN MOTION such as the speed lines of a fellow in a comic strip getting hurled through space. I mean the kind of movement you experience by seeing that forms, lines, and tones have different sizes, different shapes and different values. I mean variety. A picture should have dynamic movement in order to appeal to your artistic sense.

Perspective baffles most people. The fact is that we can't see things as they really are. For example, we know that the edges of a road are parallel and that they don't come together in the distance, but if we look down a long avenue lined with trees of equal size that stretch far away from you, they seem to coverage at a vanishing point. The real reason is that the back of your eye is a screen like the film in your camera, and it makes close images look large and distant images look small. So if you are going to draw a convincing picture as they eye sees it, you must duplicate its impression by making everything in the distance get very small and the objects up close must fill the width of the screen. If you are looking at the flat end surface of a cube, you see only one vanishing point.

PERSPECTIVE

If the corner edge of a cube is closest to you, then you can see both flat planes and they must each have a vanishing point far off beyond both sides of your vision.

When you look along a curved road, there are actually hundreds of vanishing points because each change of degree in the curve has its own perspective.

The only thing they have in common is that they are all on the same eye level lines.