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Before and after spending time on composition studies - did it change your workflow or just your final piece?
I spent about 3 months really drilling composition rules after watching a Marco Bucci talk, and my sketches now come together in half the time but some people say it made my work feel too formulaic, so which side do you lean toward?
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sam_harris684mo ago
Wait... someone actually said your work got too formulaic after 3 months of studying composition? That's wild to me because I spent way longer on that stuff and my stuff got looser not tighter, like I stopped cramming things into the frame because I finally understood why negative space worked. Studying composition doesn't bake in rules, it just gives you a bigger toolbox for making decisions faster... people who say that probably haven't drilled it themselves.
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robert_bennett294mo ago
Yeah honestly @sam_harris68 I think you nailed it because that was basically my experience too. I spent like 2 months just drilling rule of thirds and golden ratio stuff and at first my sketches felt stiff, but after a while it just became automatic and I started breaking the rules without thinking about it. The biggest change for me was in my workflow - I used to spend forever trying to figure out where to put things on the page, now I just rough it out in 5 minutes and spend the rest of the time on the fun parts like value and color. I can see how someone might look at early studies and say it's formulaic, but that's just the learning phase where you're following rules to a T before you internalize them. It's like learning to play guitar scales - you sound robotic at first but then you learn to bend them into something that feels natural.
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