Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Rule of Thirds

 

St Ives Harbour - Buildings - Rule of Thirds

Lesson 32 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about the rule of thirds - a popular technique for composing visual images. The “rule” divides a scene into thirds (both horizontally and vertically) using two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines. Aligning important elements of a picture along these lines or at their intersections is supposed to create more visual interest than placing the subject at the centre.

Rule of Thirds Grid

Philip suggests exploring the rule of thirds in your compositions. As an exercise, I tried to improve the two images I picked in the Root Rectangle exercise. I used a rule of thirds and a phi grid to refine the selections - a phi grid is like a rule of thirds grid except it divides the image according to the Divine Proportion resulting in grid lines that are closer together; which in turn moves the more important elements of your picture closer to the centre.

Phi Grid

I looked at over 20 different options for each scene and ended up with selections almost identical to the ones I picked in the original exercise.

St Ives Harbour - Boats - Rule of Thirds

In both cases I favour images in which the lower third is a foreground of empty sand. As I work on the pictures some more, I may try to include some extra details and contrast at some of the points of intersection.

Sunrise

Sunrise
Watercolour on Paper
12cm x 16.5cm (4.75" x 6.5")

Sunrise is the seventh topic in the Skies and Weather chapter of Creating Textures in Pen & Ink with Watercolor by Claudia Nice.

Claudia observes 

Traditionally the sunrise has been thought of as pastel and delicate. In truth the sunrise can rival the sunset in colouration.

This matches my experiences – I’ve seen some spectacular sunrises – but not very many - I am usually asleep. I should make more effort to get up to draw and paint in the early morning. Sunrise is an easier time to draw and paint than sunset because at sunset you are racing to finish before it gets dark - at sunrise you can always finish off from memory as the sky gets lighter.

This is another sky based on a Javid Tabatabaei demonstration - How to paint sky in watercolor painting. This one was a learning experience, this picture is my twelfth attempt at the sky and there is still room for improvement. It is critical to have the right relative intensity of yellow and blue (and the right pigments), so you don’t end up with green. Then there is the timing of the different layers – waiting until the sky has just the right amount of wetness before adding the clouds. Javid’s clouds look much more natural than mine – which is something for me to work on.