Artists' Master Series: Composition & Narrative

The series “From the Masters of Art” brings together artists who paint with conventional paints and those who create digital images. The book “Composition and Narrative” is the second in the series “From the Masters of Art” after the bestseller “Color and Light”. It consists of three sections - theory, educational materials and a gallery. The first section examines the theoretical principles of building a composition and its use in art, from rock drawings to masterpieces of modern digital art. You will learn about the golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence, the rule of thirds and about compositional elements - shapes, proximity and scale, rhythm and movement, perspective, texture and contrast. You will learn how to use color, brightness, and light correctly in composition, then move on to studying the types of composition—landscape, portrait, and still life—and finally learn how and for what reasons an artist can break the rules of composition. The second section examines narrative and the specifics of storytelling—in individual drawings and in a sequence of frames, as well as ways to reproduce narrative in an image. You will learn such techniques for constructing a narrative as the use of perspective, scenery, point of view, symbolism, and metaphors, techniques for deeper immersion of the viewer into the world of the painting, personification of animalistic characters, exaggeration, humor, and ambiguity of elements, and you will also learn what the simplicity and complexity of reproducing a story through an image is. It also explores ways to enhance narrative using various compositional techniques, including point of view. The four parts of the Learning Materials section—by Devin L. Kurtz, Nathan Fawkes, Joshua Clare, and Dom Leigh—are stand-alone projects that will only be useful if you have mastered the two introductory sections. Each artist featured in the learning materials has their own artistic style, creative background, and ability to properly compose and convey narrative in images.