Mastering Composition, Ian Roberts – Book Review

144 pages plus DVD.  I thought I’d check out a book on composition and this book by Ian Roberts has been getting rave reviews for some time.  So I thought I’d start here.  There are four main sections  in the book.  Let’s take them one at the time.

The first big section was on what he called armatures.  I found it fascinating.  He talked about certain ways to design a painting and illustrated it with examples.  There were some truly amazing mathematically constructed old masters in there.  This is what I wanted to read about in a book on composition.

The next section was on value masses and on treating them in an abstract way.  Again, this was what I wanted to read about, although it’s something that’s also been covered in other books (like Tom Hoffman’s classic).

The third big section was on colour and this was where I started to become disengaged.  There was interesting stuff in there about how colour’s not just about hue and value but also about intensity (intensity being the thing you dull down by mixing in some earth colours).  Kind of interesting but I’ll be buying a book on colour theory sometime, at which point this section will become redundant for me.  This is also the stage at which a book that started looking relevant to all mediums became more oils focussed.  There’s a bit where he said that paintbrushes are dumb and that you can’t leave them to do all the work.  I’ve heard Hazel Soan say exactly the opposite on YouTube (and I need to get her Essence Of Watercolour book at some point to learn more).

And the fourth section was on guiding the eye through the painting.  It’s one of those things that many writers talk about but nobody takes the time to explain.  And the bad news is that, despite Ian devoting a whole chapter to the subject, I didn’t find that he explained it well.  There are lots of examples but this feels like one of those areas where the principles need to be set out at the beginning and then illustrated with examples.  The DVD acts as a supplement to this section, with lots of examples of paintings being slightly tweaked in a way that makes them worse by guiding the eye to the wrong place.  And this was another section that was too focussed on oil painting for my liking.

Overall, I found the book useful.  The first section was excellent but subsequent sections less so, either because they were less relevant to watercolour or not well enough explained. And looking back at this book a couple of years later, it seems a little dull.  I give this one three palettes.