Composition: Bird Watching in the West

This is a small (4" x 6") collage I made on watercolor paper. It's the size of a postcard. I'm not saying it's a good collage or a bad collage; it's just something I quickly put together one morning without really thinking about it. There are some compositional elements to it, however, that I find interesting.

First of all, I began by gluing down a piece of brown paper that I'd used to clean my paintbrushes on, so the slashes of white in the background are white gesso. I also painted the little white dots in the lower right.

I had an old newspaper on my counter (from 1959, I believe) and I tore out a fashion ad because it was so retro and humorous (to me). And then I had a broken-down book I'd gotten at a library sale called Bird Watching in the West. Remembering that back in the 1960s some Brits referred to girls as "birds," I found that humorous and pasted it down on top of the turban-topped woman.

I had a couple of black and cream-colored circles on my counter and, seeing how the dark black circle echoed the dark black turban, I pasted both circles onto the collage.

The piece of masking tape had fallen off some cardboard, so I glued it on and then, because the tape looked kind of plain, I glued on a torn piece of the newspaper ad, a piece that said "Special Purchase."

Finally, I added a bunch of smaller circles, all cut out of the same newspaper ad.

When I analyze the composition — what I used and where I placed it — I see I've created movement. A lot of movement. But how?

1) Notice how your eye moves from the woman's dark turban down to the dark circle and back again. Voila! Diagonal movement there on the left side of the picture.

2) Your eye makes a connection between the dark/light circles on the left, the circles in the lower left, the painted white dots in the lower right, and again in the upper right. Our eyes recognize patterns and similarities, and whether we realize it or not, they (and our brain) make a connection between all those circular forms. As a result, your eye moves all around the frame, going from circle to circle.

3) And because the small circles, the "bubbles" if you will, run along a diagonal line from the lower left corner to the upper right, your eye automatically follows that subliminal line. Your eye moves diagonally from bottom to top, from top to bottom. In addition, her arm runs along that same diagonal line, which adds to the feeling of movement.

Whether we're designing a collage, a photograph, a quilt, a painting, these elements of pattern recognition and eye movement play an important part. By becoming hyper-conscious of what we're doing and why we're doing it, our compositions will improve, will become intuitive, and will become second-nature, without our even noticing it.

©Carol Leigh, running in circles all the time