Criteria for improving your paintings
Awhile ago I read this blog post from OPA about how the jurying committee for OPA exhibitions set criteria for to getting your painting accepted into their shows.
Here are the ten questions they use as criteria.
Is there a dominant value? —> values
Is there a dominant harmony? —> color and values
Is there a clear center of interest? —> compositions
Is there balance? —> composition
Do the shapes and lines lead the eyes to focal points within the picture plane? —> composition
Is the drawing accurate?
Are the value relationships convincing? —> values
Are the color temperature relationships consistent and believable? —> color
Is there an appropriate variety of hard and soft edges? —> edge quality
Is the paint application varied and interesting? —> edge quality
When I read through this list of questions, I was struck how the questions either dealt with composition or one of the three painting fundamentals, values, edge quality, and color.
When I started to learn how to oil paint, I broke up the areas of technical skill into these categories to make it easier for me to learn each concept deeply. And it is also why I have begun to organize my online Floral Still Life classes to have an overarching focus each term. My goal is to maximize the learning experience and to help you feel more confident about the decisions you make when painting. Which in turn, make all future painting sessions more fun.
Going forward, my Floral Still Life class focuses on color in the autumn term. During the winter term the class focuses on values, and the spring term focus is on edge quality
As for learning about composition, I have a few books to recommend.
Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar Payne. This is by and far my favorite book on composition, here is a book review I wrote.
Composition by Henry Rankin Poore, here’s a book review I wrote.
Composition: A Painter's Guide to Basic Problems and Solutions by David Friend, this is a fun composition book, lots of good exercises to go through.
Cezanne’s composition by Erle Loran, this is a fantastic book on the concepts of modern composition, only analyzing Cezanne’s methodology. We went deep into this topic in my Cezanne Master Copy Class.
We are so lucky because the information is out there to be discovered. However if you would rather not sift through a pile of books, be sure to sign up for one of my classes :)