Composition study

I've been doing some landscape studies in colour in an attempt to brush up my colour chops, but after doing a few I felt that what really made a picture work was the composition. There's too much to think about when you're trying to cover colour, value, composition and drawing all at once so I wanted to focus on composition.

At the moment I'm sitting one floor below the incredible Neil Campbell Ross whose compositions are just killer. I was looking at some of his work for inspiration for this one.

Switching lens

I've been doing some more drawing on my commute but it's been quite difficult since I moved office. The train is shakier and more crowded so it makes things a bit tricky.

Still, I did these two drawings of the same guy the other day. At first I was trying to identify the most prominent anatomical features and make sure that I emphasised them. I wasn't very happy with the drawing though so I gave it another go.
This second time I was going for the big picture. I looked at the face, looked down on the paper and drew the impression that it left in my mind, without worrying too much about individual  features.

I think the first drawing is a more accurate depiction of what I saw but the second one captures the life and gesture better. It was interesting to see how switching from one way of looking to the other produced a very different drawing.