Classic composition

-By Howard Lyon I love the Baroque. From Rubens and Caravaggio to Bernini and Bach. I love the passion and the movement. I was visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was taking with my wife about composition in paintings and explained how the baroque movement took spaces that were

-By Howard Lyon I love the Baroque. From Rubens and Caravaggio to Bernini and Bach. I love the passion and the movement. I was visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was taking with my wife about composition in paintings and explained how the baroque movement took spaces that were

Highlighted Class COMPOSITION AND STAGING FOR VISUAL DEVELOPMENT This class was designed and is taught by my father Robert Watts. He designed the class to emphasize the brick and mortar concepts of picture making so often lacking or not really taught at all in today’s schools and institutions of art. Although tailored to students looking to go into visual development this class would be equally beneficial to the illustrator or fine artist. As a matter of fact I felt so strongly about the…

Have you ever been caught off-guard by a visual tangent in your art? When creating a composition there are so many different things to juggle that it's easy to miss even the obvious flaws - and that’s when tangents sneak in.

For me, even a simple landscape painting needs to have three basic elements. A foreground, midground and background. How those three elements are handled will

When you point your camera at a random thing on the street, you usually don’t expect much. But in the vast sea of dull photos that fill your camera roll, one stands out. Call it a miracle, or a lovely surprise, but if you feel like the pic is superior in composition, style, lighting, and somewhat resembles a classical painting, it may be that you have just encountered “accidental renaissance.”

Many years ago I bought the classic book "Rendering In Pen and Ink" by Arthur Guptill. Like most of the art books I buy, it seemed importa...

We all understand the importance of lines in art. A line is the first thing we learn to draw. But we tend to overlook the importance of implied lines. These are lines that are not actually there but rather implied or suggested by the context of the artwork. In this post, I will go into more detail on