Ian Roberts Art Instruction DVD: Mastering Composition (2.5 hours) DVD with leaflet

Ian Roberts Art Instruction: Mastering Composition (2.5 hours) DVD. Build the foundation for consistently better painting. This video course is packed with over 2 ˝ hours of knowledge, encouragement, insight, tips exercises, graphics, animation sequences, critique, and demonstrations.

Everything you need to dramatically improve your painting. Ian shows the importance of seeing in terms of abstract shapes, shows the need for an armature and how the eye moves on the picture plane. Ideas, techniques and examples that will help enormously to extract the most dramatic and powerful compositions from what you have chosen. Learn to enhance value and color shapes with arrangement and the play of emphasis between them.

You get workshop critiques and 45-minute landscape demonstration and a workbook to simplify exercises designed to help you learn to “see” structure and composition fundamentals.

Ian Roberts is an honors graduate of the Ontario College of Art. He studied figure and landscape painting in Florence, Italy. He has been represented by galleries in Toronto, Dallas, Denver and Carmel, is an artist member of the California Art Club & a signature member of the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association.

Build the Foundation for Consistently Better Paintings

Most unsuccessful paintings are ruined before the brush even gets to the canvas. Why?

Weak composition. There's no structure. No foundation.
If you start a painting that lacks structure--well, you know the experience... repainting this part, overworking that and getting lost and frustrated about how to proceed. And until that structural problem is understood it will continue to plague, frustrate and hamper each painting's progress and success.

Composition is the bedrock of every good representational painting.

For something as fundamental as this it's surprising it isn't isolated and taught more often. Go to the list of classes at your local art college and see if you can find a course on composition.

Ian Roberts has taught painting to hundreds of students in Provence and Tuscany, as well as the U.S. through his school Atelier Saint-Luc. He realized after teaching workshops for the past ten years to both beginners and professionals, if there was room for one badly needed teaching tool to help representational painters, composition was it.

So he has developed a unique video course that will teach you the basics of strong compositions. It will dramatically improve your painting, whether you paint landscapes, still-lifes or figures.

"Like taking a painting workshop in your own home."
A seven-part video course with workbook, packed with ideas, critiques,
demonstrations, animated sequences, insights, and exercises.

1. Thinking in
Abstract Shapes 2. The Need for
an Armature 3. How the Eye Moves on the
Picture Plane 4. Framing and
Cropping 5. Values and
Color Shapes 6. Workshop
Critiques 7. Demonstration 8. Workbook
Exercises

Each of the seven parts of the video course will help you "see" more effectively as a painter.

You will:

See less in terms of subject matter and more in terms of abstract shapes

Learn how the eye actually moves on your canvas and how it gets distracted and pulled out of your painting

Learn several time-tested conventions for leading your eye where you want it to go

Learn to create the most dynamic and engaging composition from whatever you have chosen to paint.

With a few principles and a little thought you can build solid, workable compositions consistently. And if your paintings aren't working you'll know why and what you need to do to get them to work. It will no longer be hit and miss why one painting comes together and the next does not.

When this happens, the result in the quality of your work, and especially in the feeling of expressing yourself, is dramatic. You'll find you'll be bolder, less tentative, when you paint. You'll have greater clarity of how to proceed. You'll know when to stop. Because your success rate is higher you'll be more motivated to paint.
View a Preview Clip