Arrange: create a composition

This is the third of four emails this week that are part of a botanical art challenge leading up to the spring equinox. I am a watercolor painter, but whatever your medium is (photography, writing, digital artist…), you are welcome to join or just follow along. Everyone will have access to the prompts! Paid subscribers will have access to the full post, videos, and community chat.

Welcome back!

Today you are going to arrange your found items into a composition that you would like to use in your paintings, photographs, or other art pieces.

If you are planning on painting, you can also start on some preliminary sketches so that you are ready to start painting tomorrow.

Other ideas would be to arrange your items into flat-lay compositions and photograph them, make a tablescape or alter, or use them to highlight something else, like a piece of art or photograph.

Arrange your items into pleasing compositions

Start by arranging your actual items on a table. You can also use a piece of paper or something with a border so you can think about how your items interact with the edges. Here are some things to remember/think about while you are working.

• Open composition: Your image goes off the page, inviting the viewer to imagine where it is going (think about a branch going off the edge of a page)

• Closed composition: Your whole image is within the confines of the paper, and there is white space around the image (think about a traditional botanical illustration with a flower in the middle of the page)

• The rule of thirds: Think about a grid with two lines in either direction, where the lines meet are good points to place important parts of your image, OR they can provide a place for the eye to rest.

• Intuition: Trust what you like. There are rules, but whether you know them or not, or break them or not, is not always important. Sometimes you just like how something looks and feels.

Once you have some arrangements, or a few, that you like, make some sketches, so you have somewhere to start with your painting tomorrow. You can also take photos — especially if you have to move your items before you are finished.

I’m going to show you how I go about this while considering some of these design concepts in the video.