Strengthen Your Paintings With Dynamic Composition, Frank Webb – Book Review

Now this is interesting.  I just assumed that all books on composition were going to be similar, covering the same sort of stuff.  The only book I’d read on composition before this was the one by Ian Roberts.  It was a book that looked at composition at quite a high level, focusing on armatures and on the viewer’s journey through a painting.  This book is so different to Ian’s and has so little in common with it that I think the two would work well as complements.

Frank digs down to a lower level than Ian.  Frank’s starting point is seven types of mark (line, shape, value, colour, texture, size, direction) and seven ideas (unity, contrast, dominance, repetition, harmony, balance, gradation).  And the book just explores these.  There’s a chapter on each of those seven types of mark (and, yes, I know that’s bad terminology on Frank’s part – size isn’t a type of mark).  There’s nothing at the higher, Ian Roberts level, about armatures and where to put the centre of interest.

Although the cover of the book talks about 24 artists showing us how to design paintings, it’s only Frank showing us but using the art of 24 artists.  Most of the artwork is Frank’s, though, and this is because he’s written this book using the same principles as he’s telling us to use in his paintings.  There’s variety in the artists but one artist dominates.  Similarly, the style throughout the book varies from the normal style that I expect in a book like this to brief demos to whole pages full of quick fire bullet pointy tips (and some of these are really useful, not just throwaway slogans).  All these changes in pace keep the book interesting, just as a bit of variety in shapes, lines, etc will keep my paintings interesting once I’ve absorbed everything in this book.

This book is well packed with useful tips.  I make notes on all the art instruction books I read and the ratio of length of my notes to length of the book is very high.  Which reminds me, the book is 136 pages long.  I have it in paperback but I think it’s still available in hardback too.  Given how good it is, I’d recommend buying the hardback version.

Perhaps, more than anything, this book has opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about painting.  What more can you ask of a book?  This is a five paletter.

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