One of the questions I get pretty often is about composition. "How to make a good looking art journal page, that is composed well?" It's one of those questions that usually annoys me, because I dislike the idea of planned out pages in an art journal. But as someone who has studied composition for art and photography, I intuitively arrange what i'm doing around the rule of thirds and the golden mean. I no longer think abotu composition, unless I'm working on a specific project.

So my initial response is that you should study composition. In school we spent a lot of time looking at art and photos. Looking specifically at how things are aranged on a page and how our eyes moved around in relation to those objects and color. I filled pages of a journal with little doodles based off the covers of magazine.Simplifying the objects down to simple shapes. faces became ovals, bodies triagles and rectangles. Works becames rectangles. And so on. Now when I work in my art journal I simply don't think abotu these things. So go to barnes and noble, pull a dozen magazines off the rack, grab a cuppa coffee and look at each mag, and block the cover and a few pages out in basic shapes. Think about how you look at the page. Do this a dozen times across the next 6 months. Composition will become much more natural to you over time.

If you have issues viewing the videos here on my blog please click the title of the video on the upper left of the video and it will open up in YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

For the next one it's about photography, but he really goes into how images look and work. He also has great composition and really explores the arrangment of Kermit on the page.