PICTURE MAKING: COMPOSITION & DESIGN
In this course, you’ll explore the process behind making imaginative compositions.
Creating exciting compositions and visualising images that are in your imagination is difficult to do – this course looks at various techniques artists use to bring an imagined image into reality.
The course focuses on acquiring the skills and information necessary to construct imagined compositions, encouraging a variety of approaches, media and experimentation.
An illustrated presentation is given at the start of each lesson, to explain and put in context the ideas explored.
Any level welcome!
— Lesson 1: Empty Space in ArtAn exercise focused on incorporating negative/blank/empty space into compositions. These ideas used in traditional East Asian art (and its influence on picture-making in general) will also be looked at.
— Lesson 2: How the eye moves around picturesYou will be shown examples of how artists throughout history carefully constructed their images to guide the viewers’ eye around compositions, creating a flow and to help the eye look at everything, or to point towards something important within the picture.
— Lesson 3: Borrowing from Art HistoryAs a starting point for an original composition, you will take ideas and visual elements artworks from history, using collage and line drawing to develop your own composition.
— Lesson 4: Movement, Drama & Dynamism in ArtLooking at how various artists have tried to achieve a sense of movement, drama and dynamism in pictures.
— Lesson 5: Japanese Woodblock printsLooking at the influence of Japanese Woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e) on picture making, and trying out compositions influenced by their language.
— Lesson 6: Still-life (thumbnail sketches)A lesson designed to explore the idea of generating and developing composition ideas via the use of ‘thumbnail sketches’.
Featured Paintings: Carl Randall
Tutors: Carl Randall @carlrandallartist
About the tutor:Carl Randall graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, The Royal Drawing School and Tokyo University of Arts, Japan.
He is the winner of national art competitions including the 2012 BP Travel Award at the National Portrait Gallery and The Sunday Times Watercolour Competition, as well as the Nomura Art Prize in Japan.
Randall has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, National Portrait Gallery, Jerwood Gallery, Mall Galleries, and art fairs in Taiwan, Istanbul and Switzerland. He recently has solo exhibitions in Japan and London. His work in the collections of The Royal Collection, UCL Museum, London, Tokyo Geidai Museum, Japan, and Fondation Carmignac, Paris.
He lived in Japan for 10 years and his catalogue ‘Japan Portraits’ is on sale at the Hayward Gallery.
