Good morning and it's time once again for Art Lessons!

To keep an artistic "balance" in your work—to prevent one property; contrast, relative size of areas, colors—from dominating a composition, traditional painters have adopted a work approach. It's a sound one, and digital artists should use it, too.

Always work from the general to the specific.

Example: When I was 12 or so, and The Fates had already cast me as a Career Illustrator, I'd envision something, and then work a small area to completion, then choose a different area and work that to completion, and so on.

My finished drawings looked like highly detailed quiltwork. This was because I had no grand vision, no general map of how the whole of the composition would come together.

You work from the general to the specific.

What I (generally) posted a few days ago is an outline of a cardboard box. I myself began with a cube shape (you don't get more general than that!), then to make it asymmetrical, I folded three (not four) of the top flaps out. Next, I considered how the box should be lit. This took more time than anyone would realize to get it "right". There are a near infinite number of possibilities for lighting this box, but the one I chose was a light and shadow setup that "revealed" all the aspects of the box. Think about this one: isn't it possible to light the box differently, perhaps more dramatically, but the downside could be that one flap falls into the shadows? I used lighting to "reveal" enough aspects of the box to make it look dimensional.

Viewer's angle? I chose a 3/4 view, and I do this quite often. Why? Because a 3/4 view, not front-on, not from the side, helps to visually explain a 3D object. A box has six sides, right? Because we face such an object, we can see no more than 3 of the 6 sides at any given moment. So why, as artists, should we cheat ourselves out of one or two sides of view when we only have 3 at maximum to begin with?

Then I chose canvas dimensions in Xara, and placed the box asymmetrically in the composition. It "works" artistically because the box has a lot of severe, straight angles that really calls attention to itself, so it could be anywhere on the canvas and it would still "own" the scene. So me? I said, "Hey, why not put it off-center in the composition?" Asymmetrical compositions, depending on what the subject is, can create a sort of dynamic tension in the audience's mind. Call this my personal style, and if and when you choose to make an asymmetrical composition, don't let it be the only trick in your artist's bag! Don't fixate on one effect, or one technique, okay?

Finally, there's shading and texture.

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Do you see now how the method of general art considerations --> specific ones....keeps a composition balanced?

I think what Stygg did is quite remarkable with the textures, one component of the scene. Do you see that the shading on the box is subtle? The transitions between light and dark are gradual and not very pronounced, as we, the viewer, would expect if we were looking at a dimly lit scene. "Contrast" is ALWAYS something artists overdo, because our brains lie to us about "distinctions". We are naturally inclined to make things different, separate, it's in our nature as humans, and something we need to fight for the sake of accuracy in our artwork.

Well done in that respect, Stygg!

Gold star, gold star!

—Gary