Sunday, October 25, 2009

Polar Bears: Setting Up a Composition

I took about a week off to visit my family, but now I'm back and ready to start drawing. I don't have much to show yet, but I want to share a little about how I put together a composition. In this case, my idea came from this photo I took at the zoo recently. The polar bears were out waiting for breakfast and I got several good shots of them pacing, but I chose this one (it has been cropped and converted to grayscale).

To make it more interesting, I decided to put a cub at her feet and I will change the background to a more natural arctic landscape with ice and mountains. I initially wanted to put the bears to the right side, hoping to balance their weight with the distant mountains. But the more I looked at my sketch, the more it didn't look right. So I will put the bears to the left side, because their weight will be balanced by the mountains and the fact that they are facing to the right. (Thanks so much to the book Design and Composition for explaining how to identify this.)

This drawing will be 17"x14" on Strathmore smooth bristol 2-ply paper (as usual!). In the next few weeks, I'll post my progress.

2 comments:

Glendon Mellow said...

Strathmore papers really are amazing. Looking forward to the bears!

Heather Ward said...

Thanks!