Composition and Design - Art Book Reviews for Artists

The Simple Secret to Better Painting: How to Immediately Improve Your Work with the One Rule of Composition

by: Greg Albert

A painting is only as good as its composition. No matter how well the colors match, how realistically the subject matter is drawn, or how accurate the perspective is, a painting will not be as attention-getting or interesting as it could if the composition is weak. One of the most important elements to any painting, composition can also be one of the most intimidating. In this simple resource, Greg Albert makes the principles of composition easy to remembr and use, as he boils all the complicated rules into one unforgettable master rule: Never Make Any Two Intervals the Same. By "interval, " Albert refers to intervals of distance, length, spacing and dimensions of shapes, as well as the intervals of the values on a value scale and the colors on the color wheel. He demonstrates this fool-proof "rule" with clear, concise diagrams and sketches, plus samples from today's top painters. Readers will get to learn from the work of Frank Webb, Tony Couch, Kevin MacPhearson, Charles Reid, Tony Van Hasselt and many more! Artists of all levels will find this invaluable secret to great composition easy to remember and even easier to use as they radically improve their compositions from the start.

Read my review Greg Albert - The Simple Secret to Better Painting

Amazon Price: $16.49 (as of 11/23/2009)

Mastering Composition: Techniques and Principles to Dramatically Improve Your Painting (Mastering (North Light Books))

by: Ian Roberts

Learn how to use a viewfinder to determine cropping and framing to create the best relationship of value masses. They will also learn to analyze paintings in terms of color shapes of value, hue, and intensity (also color temperature)the elements that make a painting. Roberts uses master works as examples to show how the eye moves through a painting. He will include before/after examples to illustrate how using the rules for good composition can improve paintings. Readers will learn how to create compositionally successful paintings through 6-8 demonstrations. Contains a bonus DVD that shows how altering one element of a painting can change the entire composition.

Read my review - Making a Mark: Mastering Composition - a recommended read

Amazon Price: $19.79 (as of 11/23/2009)

Design & Composition Secrets of Professional Artists: 16 Successful Painters Show How They Create Prize-Winning Work

An International Artist Magazine publication
Sixteen talented artists show how create a great composition using overlays, diagrams and over 120 examples of compositions that work.

Amazon Price: (as of 11/23/2009)

A Painter's Guide to Design and Composition

by: Margot Schulzke

Published in 2006 - sold 15,000 copies in 18 months

Amazon Price: $19.13 (as of 11/23/2009)

The Elements of Drawing - John Ruskin

by: John Ruskin

The Elements of Drawing was written during the winter of 1856.
- The First Edition was published in 1857;
- the Second followed in the same year, with some additions and slight alterations.
- The Third Edition consisted of sixth thousand, 1859 ; seventh thousand, 1860; and eighth thousand, 1861. The work was partly reproduced in "Our Sketching Club," by the Rev. R. St. John Tyrwhitt, M-A., 1874; with new editions in 1875, 1882, and 1886. Mr. Ruskin meant, during his tenure of the Slade Professorship at Oxford, to recast his teaching, and to write a systematic manual for the use of his Drawing School, under the title of "The Laws of Fesole." Of this only vol. L was completed, 1879; second edition, 1882.

As, therefore, "The Elements of Drawing" has never been completely superseded, and as many readers of Mr, Ruskin's works have expressed a desire to possess the book in its old form, it is now reprinted as it stood in 1859, with the addition of an Index.

Amazon Price: $24.45 (as of 11/23/2009)

Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers

by: Arthur Wesley Dow, Joseph Masheck

First published in 1899, Arthur Wesley Dow's Composition has probably influenced more Americans than any other text to think of visual form and composition in relation to artistic modernity. While Dow is known as the mentor of Georgia O'Keeffe and Max Weber, his legacy as a proponent of modern art has suffered undeserved neglect by recent artists and art historians. In Composition Dow develops a system for teaching students to create freely constructed images on the basis of harmonic relations between lines, colors, and dark and light patterns. Greatly influenced by Japanese art, he expounds a theory of "flat" formal equilibrium as an essential component of telling pictorial creation. Generations of teachers and their public school pupils learned from Dow's orientalism and adopted basic postimpressionist principles without even knowing the term. The reappearance of Dow's practical, well- illustrated guide, enhanced by Joseph Masheck's discussion of its historical ramifications, is an important event for all concerned with the visual arts and the intellectual antecedents of American modernism.

Amazon Price: $33.16 (as of 11/23/2009)

The Elements of Drawing (Draw Books)

by: John Ruskin, Bernard Dunstan

* Letter 1 concerns the basics of drawing which involve the elements
* Letter 3 concerns itself with "On Colour and Composition" and Ruskin's 9 laws

If you want to buy a copy, then I recommend that you get this edition with editing and annotations by Bernard Dunstan

Amazon Price: (as of 11/23/2009)