Image Composition

This article will look like more abstract than others I write until now. But I think it can help a lot of people doing 2D or 3D arts as well. Those information I will give you are coming from my personal research on different book of drawing. It could appear strange that you may take information from a 2D hand draw book and apply them to 3D arts but as you may see some tricks are very clever and you will need them. As those tricks are visual things I will use as much example as I can but I decide to have poor image quality (no details) to focus your attention on what I'm saying and not on the image himself.

Imagine you want to make a composition of objects on a table. And you want this composition looks "cool". How can you start ? The first step is to choose objects you want to represent. It's always easier to have the objects just on your own when you want to draw them, or have photo, drawing or models if you cannot have them directly. But it's extremely hard to model, draw, paint something if you do not have any visual support of the object. One other very important point is to lights objects the way you want to represent them. This is very important for 2D drawing less for 3D as in 3D you may change the light after the model / texture process. But it help also to see what it look like in reality and then try to recreate the same thing on you paper or computer. And the last thing is TAKE TIME ! You may start doing some sketch (even if you will model it after) so you start looking carefully at the object you want recreate.

After those words of introduction lets start. First I want to show you a simple but interesting effect. I have 3 different shapes on a "table" and I will change the shape of the table. The first one is a square table, the second image have a round table. The fact it's on a square table you will have the impression that the space is less big than having the same shapes but on a circle. Funny isn't it ?

Fig 1

Now I would like to talk about objects positions. First I placed all 3 spheres on the same line. It appear to be not interesting (beside the fact that's just spheres :-) ). Your image need more "movement" inside. Something more eye catching. Most of the time you will never have all things well aligned and placed on a line like this. So you need to move yours objects to reflect something more "natural".

Fig 2

Here we are. The 3 sphere are placed more or less randomly on the table, to cover a bit more space. And if you compare figure 2 and 3 you will see that in fact figure 3 is more interesting. Not great of course (you will not find any GREAT image in this article) but more interesting.

Fig 3

Figure 4 is a bit more interesting than 3 because overlapping a bit the objects add a sense of deep. I put shadows in those images just to help to see more the 3D but even without shadows fig 4 is better than the 3.

Fig 4

Figure 5 play with the size of the elements. It add a bit of random in this image, and when you can change the size you should. I overlapped also the smallest sphere on to of the bigger one. But you must be carefully with the size because some time it's the only information you have to see the distance. Imagine to be in the space, how could you show a far but big planet and in the same time a small but near planet ? Solutions are to overlap the near one on top of the far one or having an object between them.

Fig 5

In Figure 6 I change the object to do some others things :-) Well this time the object should remain the same size so what can we do to improve this image ?

Fig 6

Well one of the simplest solution is to have it "rotated" like in figure 7. So you may also see it from different direction. It give also the idea that not all is perfectly in order and sometimes it's exactly what you want. I cannot imagine a garden were all is perfectly on the right place, new and clean. This will also fill a bit the "empty" space of the image, even if the size, and the number of object is the same.

Fig 7

If you want to have more "mess" you may also try to broke something. Like one of the pot. It will change again the impression of the image. In this case you should add a bit of "dust". In my figure 8 I didn't add dust because I want to stay simple for the explanation but the image result very strange. In my opinion at least.

Fig 8

Now if I would like to finish this image and give a interesting feel, I would add a foreground object that "cut" a bit of the vision, this object should be blurred or dark and put some background that can be blurred or not well defined so the focus will remain on what I would like to show. In figure 9 the focus of eyes should stay on pots.

Fig 9

One other way to focus the attention of the eye is to have an object with another color. In figure 10 all is black and white but a pot have colors. So you focus you attention more on this object than the rest of the scene.

Fig 10

Well that's some interesting tricks to archive some results even if your objects are not very interesting by themselves like my pots :-) Having objects like that on a picture is called a "nature morte" in French and is a kind of art by itself. Most artists have done some "nature morte" and some results can be extremely interesting for some examples you may look at an art made by Picasso or . And the main part of the work is composing the picture.

A. Bertrand