When sitting and working a longer time, your eyes will get used to the painting, and consequently get used to any errors the painting may have in a composition sense. Here’s a quick tip to really help you achieve a nice looking digital painting, no matter what it is: flip your canvas horizontally!įlipping it horizontally will show you most of the composition problems you have in your painting, even if you don’t realize they are there. So the white space (the negative space in this one) actually helps the subjects appear, where the black area now is the positive space: While if you look at the right picture, now the negative space suddenly becomes the shape of the vase, and you will see the subject being two faces. Notice how if you look at the left part of the image, you will see a simple vase, with the white area being the negative space, properly outlining and focusing the subject (the vase). The positive space is the area your subjects take up, and you want this in focus and nicely portrayed in your image.īelow you will find an image that illustrates how important the relationship of negative contra positive space is. In general, the negative space is the area which does not include your important subjects, and it is what helps define your positive space where you place important focal points. Negative space and positive space both make up the totality of your painting. This one is a bit trickier to wrap one’s head around, but once you start getting it, your compositions will improve dramatically. Here, the hill with the tree is dead center in the image: The cross-points of the lines mark important focal points where it’s nice to place subjects. The lines in that grid marks lines of interest where subjects can be. You basically imagine that there is a 3×3 grid on your canvas. It is what artists, cinematographers, designers and photographers use when placing their subjects in their visual media.

When determining where important things should be placed in paintings, it’s a bad habit to always place things in the dead center.Įnter The Rule of Thirds. I use it pretty much all the time, albeit subconsciously these days, and I consciously alter it to not always have the same look on my paintings. But, here it is – and it’s a great guideline to use a lot. Hear that? Guideline! It’s not a stone-set rule, and I encourage people to achieve interesting compositions without sticking to it zealously.

So let me keep this short, since there is so much on this on the web and everyone worships this guideline.

Is ctrl paint good