How to Create an Amazing Drawing

In order to create a good painting or drawing, the composition, or the way objects are arranged on the piece of paper, is vital. The ideal composition leads your eye around the paper, makes sure the objects do not appear as though they are floating in the middle of nowhere, has balance, and has objects going off the edges of the paper. Right now, I will teach you how to make a great composition, no matter what you are drawing.

A good composition needs the focal point of your drawing to NOT be in the center of the paper. In order to make it more interesting, follow the Rule of Thirds, which tells you to place the focus of your drawing at the thirds of your paper. This means, if you had a grid on your paper that divided your paper into thirds, those lines would be where you should place the main object in your painting. You also need balance, also known as asymmetry. So if you have a tall object on the right side of your painting, you will need a short object in the bottom left-hand corner in order to balance out the drawing.

The first step to a good composition is making a few different thumbnail sketches of what you want to draw. Thumbnail sketches are small sketches, you can usually fit a few on one piece of paper, that help you plan out what you want to draw, they can also help you find the best composition for your drawing. ALWAYS draw a few thumbnails. If you just start drawing an image that you have pictured in your mind's eye, you may end up putting hours of hard work into the painting only to find that it does not flow well. So don't be afraid of experimenting with different arrangements of the objects you are trying to draw, you may stumble upon a brilliant composition that you never would have thought of.

In order to make a drawing believable, objects cannot appear as they are floating on the paper. You can stop this from happening by adding in cast shadows. Cast shadows are the shadows that appear on the ground or table. When you stand outside on a sunny day, your shadow is a cast shadow. Cast shadows should be dark and should tell you which direction your light source is coming from.

The last important thing is having objects going off the edge of the paper. This causes your eye to be lead around the paper and makes it more exciting. If all the things in your drawing were drawn within the boundaries of your paper, no matter how good the craftsmanship is, your eyes wouldn't travel through the items and, therefore, wouldn't see the whole picture the way it was meant to be viewed.

Composition is very important, perhaps the most important part of a painting or drawing; it makes the piece of art realistic and exciting. So, the next time you are planning on drawing or painting, create a thumbnail sketch beforehand and think of all the important parts of composition before picking up that paintbrush.