Composition.    To begin our demo, I think we should just start off with a little bit on composition. Where you decide to place your images is a little crucial to the impact of your picture.

This is what the scene would look like if you positioned everything centrally. The horizon is nearly half way up and the boat and sun are half way along. This gives a static feel to the picture. There's no movement in it and if you start from the bottom and look at the reflections, your eye goes straight up and out of the picture. The viewer wouldn't be able to roam around and would quickly dismiss it. We need to make it more interesting.

As a general rule, we go by thirds. Divide the sheet into thirds (don't draw the lines though), and place your images up or below/left or right of the third lines.

From these examples you can see that the images with thirds work better than the central plan.

You just need to take a pencil and do a few thumbnail sketches of different layouts. In this next picture you can see some examples of thumbnail sketches. They are very quick to do and save a lot of time from making large sketches.

Once you are happy with a layout then you can make a larger sketch to plan the proper positioning. Of course you can just draw in pastel straight onto the painting itself, but if you are at all unsure then a pencil sketch can often give you insight as to where you need the darks and lights of your painting.

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