Composition for Noobs | Beginner Guide

hello everybody my name is Julian or flow graphics and welcome to composition for noobs now this isn't just for beginners this can be for anyone really there's going to be a lot of useful facts and info in this video and it's gonna be super super intuitive I'm gonna draw a bunch of pictures and do a bunch of things so it's gonna be really easy to follow along so I've sort of split up composition into three sort of tiers or sections now composition applies for anybody like really if you're a photographer or videographer if you make

game design if you an illustrator or painter or anything anything to have art you need to know composition so I've split this up into flow which is the rules leading lines and negative space I've also split this into colour and focus which is color and focus and then the story which is the content the implied story also the style and the emotion now I'm going to go through all of these sections one by one and show you if you master all of these together it's going to make your artwork or whatever you create way way

better and you will get really good at composition so let's start with number 1 which is flow so I'm going to draw these two little scenes here these compositions and I'll show you how those three elements make up flow I which are the rules the lady lines a negative space so if I draw a little beach scene here I'll make a seagull or bird hum and then this can be the waves and the ocean and a little sunset and some sand pretty simple scene not much to it but it's a nice scene it has a

good composition and there's a couple reasons for this one is it follows the rule of thirds so if I draw sort of like a check a box like a dice you can actually see each one of these points the bird the Sun the ocean it perfectly lies on each of those actually cross sections of the rule of thirds it also flows nicely with the leading line so leading lines are basically where your eye looks and have what sort of directions the image guide you in and you can see it sort of has this sort of

pattern where you go around in a circle as you look at it where you look at a seagull you look at the Sun you look back up to the seagull and you just sort of have this nice sort of pattern or the circle but if I then copy this image and we'll change it and will actually adjust the composition a little bit so I'll sort of erase these little edges here and then draw in a little bit here with composition now it's further up the camera is looking more down and the seagull and the whole

sort of ocean everything's right to the top and this has totally changed those leading lines or lines of action because we no longer have this nice sort of spiral and all this negative space framing the top of the bird and the Sun it's now right at the top of the frame and your eyes are sort of want to look up everything just points straight up like a pyramid and it sort of leads you outside of the photo it's not really aesthetically pleasing it sort of seems a little bit odd because your eyes does sort of

naturally wanted to go up and look out whether on the left your eyes is naturally want to sort of cycle around and basically just keep in the middle and that's how composition just very very simple thing can actually affect that it's just all I did was just move it up a little bit out of the frame but then it just sort of offsets the balance of the image a little bit it changes the lines of action it changes the rules that it leads by and it also changes the negative space which is what I'll show

you right now so definitely the sky here is a big form of negative space in this image so if I just fill in the sky like that you can see on the left there's a lot more negative space than on the right and this sort of gives the impression on the left image of the negative space is sort of pushing down on all that sort of detailed section on the left which is you know the waves and the Sun and the pole and the sand and all of all of that and it gives a nice

balance we've got this big detailed section and then this big sort of wall of blue that sort of frames the seagull and then everything else is sort of kept nicely down to the bottom if you go to the right there's a lot more section of detail and a lot more sort of foreground that's happening and almost feels like that sort of pushing up and we sort of lose the balance on the right-hand side there's too much of that where there's not much matt negative space we can fix this you could sort of color understand and

try and make that another form of negative space which would balance it a little bit but then if you put in some grass or put in any details you would lose that negative space you'd be further adding in foreground elements and details and it would make the image quite busy and there'll be a lot going on if that's what you want to achieve that could potentially work but you need to know the impacts of this and how it actually changes your view of the image because it all matters all the stuff matters a lot so

if we go through these sorts of things now we've got the rules which you know the fibonacci spiral is a great rule if you haven't seen that also we've got the rule of thirds there's a bunch of different sort of rules for photography I don't like to follow them too much saying that though the Fibonacci spiral is interesting it's a lot of nature and rule of thirds is just it just always works if you take a photo of a tree and then a little Sun just think about oh okay if I just quickly move that

tree and the Sun to be on those rule of third lines it might just make it look a bit more interesting or if I want the tree to be right in the middle of the frame that's a focus that's fine too but you just need to know how that will actually affect your scene and then also think about the negative space above if it's just a big blue sky and you've got all this dead space above the tree and the Sun is that good is that you what you want do you want the field to

look at all that negative space or should you draw a little cloud up there which can act as a bit of padding for the viewer to look back in another thing is we've sort of lines of action is you could actually draw lines of action before you even create the image so here I've just create a couple of lines and I'm turning this into an image so that's supposed to be the Batmen signal hum and then we've got some little buildings behind and a little city so I started with a couple of random lines which

I thought were interesting and I made a pretty interesting composition out of that image so that shows you how strong you can make lines and make them a strong part of your image and next thing is also converging lines this is just a little sort of technicality with composition it's also to do if color ooh as well which I'll talk about later but you don't want lines to essentially be sort of overlapping like you can see the pole here and the sunlight and the bird and the Sun all of the edges of those are overlapping

and it's what's called converging lines it doesn't look too good if I just quickly redraw this in a slightly different way but SADS move a couple of meters over on the beach so there's a bit more of a gap it's suddenly it's fine but if that seagull was right on the edge of the water and overlapping the Sun and overlapping the light trail of the Sun it would look a bit odd there'll be a lot of things all sort of corresponding on the same point and it doesn't look too good so think about the rule

of thirds think about the fibonacci spiral think about other rules of composition also think about the lines of action and how they lead you throughout the image and what sort of is appealing to look at and then also think about the negative space when you're creating photos because negative space is just as important as the actual photo itself because there's a lots of different elements that make up a photo and now that brings us to color and focus so these are obviously made up of color and focus I'm gonna draw a little box here it's

always hard to draw boxes freehand so what's gonna be in this box is a composition I'm gonna make two of them there'll be identical compositions but I'll change the colors so I'll let you see as I sort of speed through all this I'll speed it up and just talk over what I'm doing and basically the exact same saying all the colors are different now these aren't necessarily good or bad they're just different and they give very different effects and they change the way that you view the image and they give off also sort of different

feelings and they're just different so if we start with the left one sort of probably the most noticeable part is the converging colors just like I talked about converging lines previously we have converging colors the cliff face is the same color as the sand and the guy that happens to be wet or the girl actually just happens to be wearing a blue a green jacket which is the exact same color as the ocean the next thing is all of the portion all sort of the lower portion besides the sky is a bit of a warmer

hue the green is a bit more shifted towards yellow which makes it a bit well so the blue is a shifted bit more towards a green we've got some autumn colors with the trees and then we have this blue sky at the top which makes this big divide in color where weather is on the right it's a bit more sort of uniform there's cooler colors all throughout and then yet we have a lot of these converging colors that just really change to flow the image now a way you can potentially get around this all sort

of alter this as we focus so if I go around and cut out this girl here as good as I can actually I'll make it the opposite of that no no no I so what we need to do is if sometimes you have problems like this and you can just tell the person to go check on a different jacket or maybe when you're painting or making a character you'll actually change your color yourself but if you can't control those things you can actually change the focus and the position of the composition so maybe I'll basically

just blur the background and that will make the foreground and out a lot more those converging colors and as obvious and it really just sets apart the foreground of the background and actually changes our composition a lot of people don't think of focus when I think of composition but that's definitely something that is very very important and not only focus but also the saturation of colors as well so even if we go back over to the right we have a bright pink dress and it just draws your eyes straight to it now I chose pink

because it was just a bright color but nothing to think about it's actually color groups so for example blue and orange are actually complementary colors opposite each other on a color wheel and we could make that dress orange instead of pink but if the Sun was orange maybe there'd be a bit too much orange in the scene I don't really want to stand out so I'll actually make it pink even though technically orange would look the best compare next to that blue it doesn't look the best for the whole scene because I want it to

be unique color that's not anywhere else so there's a lot of color groups in color theory I've actually done a whole video on color theory if you want to see that too I'll have the link somewhere on the screen about color theory and color theory definitely plays a big part you can also change the saturation of colors if we just want to change the saturation about whole background it will make that foreground stand out a lot more - or we could also scroll through the hues maybe we might want to make the background a bit

cooler and the foreground a bit warmer there's a lot of things we can do to separate some aspects of the image and break it up and draw your eyes to different areas if you want to draw your eye to one place make it a lot more brighter and saturated and then otherwise make it D saturated and dark if you don't want to look at it and now for our final section which is story so I'm going to draw two boxes again and show you how composition and the content within your composition can imply story about

it so we'll draw a super simple scene here a couple sand dunes a little person standing in the middle of sand dunes and then a Sun very simple but it gives us an instant sort of vibe of what's going on and I'll recreate the same scene in the exact same way it's that one difference instead of the person in the middle they'll be to the right and they'll be pointing to left and they'll be walking so that just sort of changes a whole bunch about the scene and it's as one tiny little difference but suddenly

we have a bit of a story instead of just standing there they're actually moving to the left and you go why they're moving to the left maybe there's a beautiful away since just over the sand dunes and that's what that person is actually walking towards and obviously I'm drawing an actual Oasis here but even if you didn't have that away for strong it would actually imply a bit of story and it was literally just as simple as moving the person over a little bit and making them face one direction you you get a totally different

story to the scene so simply moving elements around can change a lot of things about your story and then if we had that person flipped and walking away then it's going on instead of walking to the Oasis he's walking away from the Oasis like why why they're doing that you know that looks pretty good down there what's making them leave Tibet falling-out with the owners of the Oasis what's going on and suddenly you've created this whole story of possibilities and things just by moving this person and it's really that simple there's a lot you can

do we've just simply the positioning of elements to create a lot of stories so I'm gonna do the same thing again I'm going to create another scene but this time we're going to focus on content so content what's in the scene let's actually give ourselves a list of content so we'll have some buildings we'll have a little car that sort of looks like a cloud I hope we'll have a person a road of course and a tree pretty easy content pretty you know vanilla I guess so let's start with scene one we're gonna draw a

road this is gonna be have a bit more perspective I guess so I want to be a bit closer to this car I'm really really bad at drawing cars so yeah give me a bit of yeah be nice very nice so here's gonna be my terrible car and it's going down the road so we don't really know if it's moving a lot I guess from this perspective and from the angle that makes you think that it's sort of racing down the road really fast and it's giving this this story I would simply just buy that

one little thing just by adding a bit of perspective you're at the front of the car you sort of down low it gives story okay it may it's a race car it's got a spoiler so it probably is a race car got a nice happy driver there's a person let's draw in our buildings let's draw in our tree and then we have a scene with that content now on the right I'll follow the same line of action I actually copy that from the left-hand side and the same sort of perspective but then I'll take the

camera out and actually lower the perspective so the same angle but then I've lowered the perspective and sort of zoomed in like I'm standing on top of a building looking down at the same scene and although it's the exact same content I've moved the driver so he's standing on the wall now instead of in the car it's the exact same content in almost the exact same layout but you can give a totally different story with the same content and this is all about composition so instead of a racecar driver driving down the road and it

could be some tense action scene maybe on the right this could be an opening scene for a shot so maybe this is a movie and you're actually trying to get a bit of an idea of what's what this city is like and it starts of this guy and he parks his car at the front of a cafe and then goes and has a coffee and this is basically your opening scene to go okay he's in a city he's standing next to his car and this is what it looks like there's not a ton of sort

of style or emotion it's a pretty standard scene but now what we're going to do is actually change the implied story and change a bit of the style and the emotion of this right-hand image by the use of color and shading so I'm gonna go for a bit of a stylistic approach I'll follow sort of just a jewel tone color scheme and let's say it's gonna be sunset so there's gonna be big shadows cast by all these big buildings and the person's sort of standing on the wall half in shadow half in the light and

the part that I want you to look at in the scene is obviously the person and the car so that will be in the light and then the rest of the elements will sort of be in shadow and the Sun lights casting is you know nice orange light over the important parts and this is how I'm using color to sort of direct the person to look at what I want them to look at I'm also using it as just a tool for my color scheme because it looks cool for the color scheme these sort of

opposing colors with the the greeny blue and the orange and it gives a bit of a stylistic approach it's got okay suddenly it's sunset it changes the story suddenly we have a bit of a stylized sort of art style for this image this sort of jewel tone effect and it creates a whole different story now it could be sort of like a sci-fi movie and it just yet it changes a lot simply just by changing the colors and then if you go back over to left let's say we'll make the car pink make it you

know have green wheels and basically make it a bit more bright a bit more punchy a bit more sort of different color scheme but then we go okay I still want the car to be the center of tenshun so let's make all of the background a bit D saturated let's make the gratin the road just simple gray colors we won't make any sort of bright colors in the road anywhere same with the buildings and the tree and everything I'm just gonna pick some standard sort of gray sort of brownie colors for the buildings paint make

that one just a bit lighter color and then also for the background I'll just pick maybe like a blue something like that to sort of a dark desaturate of blue because we want this car to stand out we want this car to be the focal point of the image the rest of it is just sort of it just sort of sits in the background you might not even look at it there could be a chase scene in the movie and although these two images have the exact same content in them or almost the exact same

content the left all you really focus on is the car and that's all you're thinking about and on the right you're thinking about this whole scene and you're thinking about the story behind it in the time of day and then the left you're thinking about or how fast is this car driving what's he driving to what's he driving from well that's a cool car like to color the car it makes you think about totally different things about the colors the style it implies totally different storylines but they all have the exact same content and that's

how much you can drastically change your idea on imagery just based on the composition and what the actual content is within that composition so before you leave I've got one final challenge for everybody watching I'm going to draw this quick scene here I'm going to speed it up and this scene is going to consist of three key elements that I've talked about in this video and I want you to write in the comments what the answers are to this now one of them it's a bit up to your own sort of opinion but there's definitely

correct answers and not correct answers so the challenge is there is a color scheme or a color group happening within the scene that definitely affects the way you look at the composition I actually talked about this exact color scheme earlier on the video next I want to tell you I want you to tell me what the story is give me your take on what the story is on the scene and then lastly I followed a rule here I followed some sort of composition rule that I talked about the start of the video tell me what

that rule is I would love for all you to actually tell me those three sort of key points in the challenge because it will really get you thinking about composition and get you thinking about the world around you and what it's made up of and how to take better photos and how to make patek games and take better video or whatever you do this really applies to any artist any creative that's making visual work graphic designers web designers anything you need to know composition there's a lot more to it obviously than what I've just talked

about in this video but that's all I could fit in in sort of a bite-sized time if you do like this sort of content feel free to subscribe I make graphic design videos I make game design videos and all sorts of different stuff on this channel and if you liked this type of video I've also created color theory for noobs and photography for noobs so if you're interested in them click on the screen or go to the description or wherever I put the links and go check them out so as always everybody have a fantastic

day it's been Julian or flow graphics here see ya