Creative Cogitation

This blog is about how to incor­po­rate the Golden Ratio into your com­po­si­tions quickly, with­out the use of a cal­cu­la­tor; after all who has time to fig­ure out how much 36 x 0.618 is when you are out there in the fresh air get­ting into the cre­ative groove.  The num­bered indexes cor­re­spond to plates in the com­pos­ite image below.

1. The gold boxes with dot­ted lines in the image below rep­re­sent cen­tered “golden can­vases” with height and width cor­re­spond­ing to the Golden ratio.  There is one ori­ented ver­ti­cally and one hor­i­zon­tally.  The dot­ted lines rep­re­sent the Golden mean, pos­si­ble places to divide the can­vas in a man­ner that is pleas­ing accord­ing to the Golden ratio (1 to 1.618…). This image has been cre­ated with the assis­tance of a cal­cu­la­tor and is pro­vided to show that the trick that fol­lows does work very well.
2. This trick illus­trated will work on any arbi­trar­ily dimen­sioned rec­tan­gu­lar can­vas.  You draw a line split­ting the can­vas in half and then in half again along the hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal dimen­sions.  You may want to use a light color and hue of the medium you are work­ing in so you don’t have to spend time eras­ing.  In the illus­tra­tion, the black lines rep­re­sent these divisions.
3. If you place a dot in the direct cen­ter of the four cen­ter boxes cre­ated by divid­ing the can­vas you will arrive at poten­tial places where the focal point should be.  The red dots rep­re­sent these pos­si­ble focal point locations.
4. In the illus­tra­tion below notice how close the dots are to the inter­sec­tions of our ver­ti­cally and hor­i­zon­tally ori­ented golden means.  No cal­cu­la­tor is required to incor­po­rate the Golden Mean into your com­po­si­tions. You really can just eye­ball it, fig­ure out where your focal points should be and pick one.  One of these loca­tions will result in a focal point that is most pleas­ing to the eye if the rest of the com­po­si­tion sup­ports it.
5. A Focal point is really the only thing that can flow out­ward off the com­po­si­tion, like a star.  In gen­eral the rest of the com­po­si­tion should draw you to the focal point.  Real­ize that lines inter­sect­ing where the poten­tial focal points will divide the can­vas accord­ing to the golden ratio; these are the bold blue lines in the illus­tra­tion below.  The light blue shad­ings rep­re­sent two pos­si­ble ways of divid­ing the can­vas, but you could just as eas­ily choose another one of the means.
6. The last image is a sim­ple illus­tra­tion based on the prin­ci­ples just discussed.

Illus­trated Les­son: How to Quickly Apply Golden Ratio to Composition

Yours in art – Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!