March 2025

Monthly Review

Mar 30

Written By Hanna True

Mastering Composition Week 2 (submitted my first post for critique… felt like a big step, because I was planning on just not participating in this part of the course)
Takeaways from Ian’s class so far:
- Keep plodding forward, and drag your skills along with you (don’t wait til you master one thing before you start learning something else… you’ll stall out). If you just keep moving forward, your learnings will build on each other.
- I should think through “critique” guidelines to assess my work with each week/ month and get Nick to critique it as well.
- It’s been really helpful to see how Ian simplifies images… this is something that’s a big hurdle for me.

Ian has really increased my understanding of drawing to an armature
- Everything in the image needs to get adjusted or modified so that all the parts fit into the desired structure
The center of interest is not so much a thing, but rather a set of relationships - light and dark at the intersection of the vertical and horizontal... this is design-driven thinking instead of subject-driven thinking.

Value creates form, not color
Learning more about creating design-driven images instead of subject-driven images
After I complete Mastering Composition, I might take Peggi’s “Free Verse Composition” class and then maybe Sandi’s abstracted still-life class?? (she said she talks a lot about composition in that class)
- Ian does a great job, but leans heavily toward a classical style (or at least it seems so to me). I’m interested in learning how the concepts apply to wonky-er art.
Practicing my drawing skills in tandem with thinking about composition has felt very beneficial. It’s hard to talk about drawing concepts like simplification and contrast, without thinking at all about composition. Composition is the framework that makes all the other concepts make sense!

“Studio state of mind” = Approaching life with curiosity and a willingness to experiment and fail… I want to get better at this!
This week in Mastering Composition was all about cropping and framing. It’s definitely challenging to start finding my own images and think about how I want to crop things.

Taking Ian’s class has reminded me how hung up I get on doing things “the correct way.” I’m learning a lot from Ian, but I'm having to fight my tendency to just try to copy the way he does things. I really appreciate how Peggi always encourages you to think about your own aesthetic. And how she reminds you that “there are multiple ways to get to the mountaintop.”

I don’t think I’m strictly a landscape painter… I think I’m more like Peggi and Sandi - I like painting animals and still lifes. I like painting landscapes as a background for the right image, but I don’t think I’m strictly a landscape painter.
I hear artists talk about “artistic license” and how you can just change things… but I never understood the thinking behind making those changes. I always wondered if it was just random, like, “Oh, well I like this better.” But Ian has brought to light how the armature guides these modifications.
Value creates form, not color. (I used not to be able to see the difference between color and value. This feels like a huge unlock!)
LEAVE ROOM FOR VIEWER PARTICIPATION! (insight from Peggi)