lmaoo so I was responding to a dm asking about my composition/style education and influences, but it was starting to get a bit unwieldy? 😛 So I'm just putting it here as a post instead:
Ha ha, I think I've had kind of an eclectic education? 😅 I did get an illustration degree in university (lol not an expensive art college, fortunately, but a pretty decent program nonetheless), so I got a lot of the basics down there, but I've studied from a lot of sources outside of that, too—particularly from the entertainment industry because I thought I wanted to work there for a while. Specifically, I've had the importance of values and composition really drilled into me over the years, and I think both Bill Perkins and Nathan Fowkes are good people to learn those from (both worked in entertainment design and both have courses online—not free, but very good.) If money's an issue right now, you could always see what they have on YouTube for free? Just gave that a try myself, and:
I haven't watched this, but it does seem promising 🤣 You could also try going down the outline of one of those courses and searching the concepts on YouTube to see what you can find for free. For instance:
Bill's first couple lectures in his composition course are on notan/chiaroscuro and value grouping, both of which seem to have some really good YouTube coverage. If you take it concept by concept, maybe you could kind of Frankenstein a course together that way?
If you want some good book resources, I'd say that Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang and Framed Ink by Marcos Mateu-Mestre are both good classics. Because I haven't specifically mentioned them yet, I would also say that learning about how to create focal points and how to divide compositions into foreground, middle ground, and background can pretty much immediately improve your compositions.
It's also important to recognize that, depending on how far you are in your art education, composition can feel like a lot to take in and a whole lot to keep in mind all at once, so just remember that it all comes over time, little by little. My first year of art school, I attended a workshop taught by Bill Perkins and honestly absorbed very little because it was too far above my understanding at the time. My second year, I remember my instructor raving about these small, simplistic composition studies Nathan Fowkes had posted to his blog, and honestly not being able to puzzle out how they were anything more than painted scribbles 😭 With enough practice, though, certain basics become second nature, and it becomes easier to add skills onto that baseline. I tracked those "scribbles" down again out of curiosity a few years later and finally understood what my teacher was talking about, so understanding does build up eventually ;)
As for other free resources, Proko's videos are usually very good. Pete Mohrbacher posts tutorial stuff on Instagram sometimes, and I've found his posts on value to be particularly helpful. Also, Jon Foster's composition is just good in general as something to stare at with wistful envy 😂
^ Not my art, but I can dream 💖
For practical exercises, I definitely did a lot of drawing from life while I was learning? This kind of thing, with a pen and maybe one or two gray markers that forced you to simplify the values down:
My old homework from back in the day 🤣 Take these with a grain of salt, my instructor was always telling me to draw larger. But yeah, I'd say don't shy away from drawing backgrounds in general if you want to eventually be able to draw them, and just try to get that drawing mileage in. Again, little by little. I think my current style actually grew out of doing drawings like these, though it's refined with practice as I did things like inktober over the years, and hopefully it continues to evolve.
One last thing I remember that was really emphasized in my education was narrative/visual storytelling through art? That's a bit harder to pin back to a source, but... I think various old episodes of Chris Oatley's Artcast and the Paper Wings Podcast were very formative in that regard back in the day. It's a bit inconvenient to listen to now, unfortunately—I think most of the old episodes are only available on Chris Oatley's website now, archived as posts—but I listened to it so often that I kind of have to mention it 😛
Anyway, I hope any of that was helpful! If you have any other questions at all, then let me know and I'll try my best to answer them 💖
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