We were talking on Messenger a while ago with Joseph Parry, a fellow DIY writer. Tavis Leafglover’s Canon of Design blog was a new one that we had started to follow. Canon of Design contains a wealth of information about composition, including the master artists, their techniques, and how they created and finished their masterpieces.
They spent months or even years creating one image. These guys left nothing to chance. They repeated the process of drawing the composition until it was bulletproof. You can read many articles on the benefits of joining Canon of Design. But I’ll let you decide for yourself.
Learn how to change my image
Anyway, I digress. We were probably chatting about art and work, and throwing profanities like there was not tomorrow, when we came to the topic of the above image. It was my largest composite at the time and may still be. The image is composed of 10 or more photos. Shelly D’inferno is part of an apocalyptic collection.
I then created the background for the image using a variety of locations in my city and a few stock images. Then I photographed each model separately, matching the light and angles.
I’m not sure how to feel about this image. Although it was my most difficult composite to date, there’s something about it I don’t like. It could have been much better. is learning even if you don’t win! This image was a great learning experience. To learning the importance of planning to shooting composite lighting. This image was necessary to help me grow.
Picking apart the image
Basic armature grid
We decided to pick apart the image with Canon of Design. We placed an Armature Grid on the image first to check if all the points and lines lined up. As you can see below, it’s a grid of divine proportions (the Golden Ratio), cut into rectangles.
It would be fascinating to see the photo I took before I learned about the grids. You may be asking, “What is an Armature Grid?” All master painters used the grid to compose their pictures (wait, did you really think that they used the rule of thirds,? The grid comes in a variety of forms, but all of them have similar diagonals and verticals that guide your composition and create dynamic symmetry. This is the Armature grid. Canon of Design has more information about grids.
We then drew an approximate grid over the image to see what it looked like. To be honest, we weren’t that disappointed. It could have been my artistic instinct. The guy’s arm on the left lined up kind of with the reciprocal lines on the left which also lined up shelly’s eye. If you follow the baroque diagonal along, it also almost lines up with headless henchman shoulders. Shelly’s blade arm, if it had been straighter, would also have lined up with the baroque triangle.