Grand Viper: Learning Comp 4 and Awesomeness

So no actual drawings from me this time, but just some learnings from a conversation with stone (figured I'd share)

So anyways I've come to notice through doing these studies that the negative space of a composition makes up a lot of what makes the composition. In fact paying attention to making interesting negative shapes will most likely lead to a good composition (just because you wont have a single negative shape. Let me explain - if you were to draw a picture of just a character in a white space with no cropping (ie we see the whole figure) then the negative shape would just be the negative of that - which isn't very interesting, just repetitive. This kind of composition is more informative and thus useful for concept art and the like, but rather useless when you get into anything illustration related.

So something I had noticed with the negative shapes is that creating overlap and crops within the figures is in part in order to break up the negative shapes. So rather than having just one negative shape if we were to crop tighter on a figure we may divide that negative space into a couple of littler negative shapes. In this same way we can get the small medium large shape relations that we get with the positive shapes that make them so interesting.

Stone drew this up for me in response to that - this is basically showing that the negative shapes purpose is simply to create an interesting shape. In the example we are looking through an alleyway, but rather than making just two rectangles for the buildings on either side we can switch up the negative shape by adding some kind of variation to them, thinking of more interesting shapes than just the basics essentially (or rather combining the essentials in interesting and new ways).

The next piece is to explain flow and rhythm. We want to avoid using too much evenness in forms and shapes, and thus the idea is instead to vary the sizes and lengths of shapes in order to create something more interesting. It's almost like creating a rhythm within the flow of the shape - like in music - that adds more flavor to it. Rather than playing 3 quarter notes we could swap that up into different holds on the note to make something more jazzy or more smooth. I have to test out just how far I can push the boundaries of anatomy with this though.