Is composition the most important hidden technique in the sense

Depends on your goal.
Most people are too focused on portraits or character design to bother with it, but if you're planning to do illustrations, it's an essencial.

>composition
>hidden technique

How, exactly?

>in the sense it separates the boys from the adults?

Way to make your thread substantially more retarded by throwing this added vague statement.

Anyway, yes, I'd consider good composition a fundamental skill, even for shit like portraits. You can have a skillfully done drawing that's poorly arranged and it'll look bad, and a mediocre drawing skillfully arranged can sometimes still look somewhat pleasing. It'll make a good drawing great.

>>2842806


lighting

>>2842811
composition still applies in portraits and is especially important in character design

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>>2844811
How is composition incorporated into character design? I'm an absolute noob so my concept of what character design even is might be off. I assumed character design work looked mostly like pic related. Pretty much sheets of ortho views and then some expressive poses.

>>2844936
Composition also applies to where you put everything on a character or how you even do their hair.

>>2844941
Ah. I thought composition only applied to how you place things on a picture. Learned something new. Thanks anon.

>>2844936
You can make things on the character work with the forms or against the forms. Conform to the natural symmetry or break it. Break up the body or unify it. Etc. People utilize composition tricks daily in real life clothing too - match your shoe color to your pants color to appear taller.

I'm just gonna say it. Composition is a meme. It's frosting that can make good work better, but it can't help bad work. Drawing is 1,000x more important. Until you can draw well, don't worry about composing.

And all that stuff about it being a science that you can dissect and explain is mostly horseshit. There's a few rules but it's mostly intuitive.

>>2842806
visual narration is

>>2844941
That's not composition retard, that's design.

Composition is not important for character design. The problem with /ic/ is that you essentially have beginners giving other beginners false information. If you had some medical problems would you go to a doctor or ask some random person on the fucking streets? If you have specific question, email artists who are accredited or show great skill.

>>2844975
>until you can do x really well, don't worry about y

Art isn't studied in a vacuum one tiny piece of the puzzle at a time. If you want to get good at drawing, you can't just do warmup line exercises, single characters and anatomy studies, you'll have to draw figures and objects in 3D space. Which gives you a great opportunity to think about composition alongside it.

>>2845022

well that's true. art is so complex though that I really think it's important to break it into smaller pieces. I think Vilppu talks about this in one of his books; he compared a great picture to landing on the moon: impossible if taken as a whole, not impossible if broken into simple steps. People over-complicate art when it doesn't have to be complicated.

I think you should get good at drawing things in isolation before you try to put them all together in a picture. Worry about composition when you've got something to compose.

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>>2845015
design and composition are very much intertwined and interchangable. Design on a character can easily be thought of as a form of composing the character in a way that leads the eye the way you want it to go. When you stop thinking of what you draw for a moment, it's fairly logical because whether it's a landscape, a portrait, an interior or a character, there is just shapes, unity and contrast and how you arrange it.

And before you start to autistically screech at me, I didn't make this up myself but read it from some much smarter, established industry professional over at muddy colors. They used this Milt Kahl drawing as example of how he expertly composed / designed this character in clear medium, large and small shapes to give the eye areas to rest and areas to explore. Exactly what composition is supposed to do.

>>2845029
Allow me to explain the difference for you since apparently /ic/ has a hard time understanding simple concepts.

Composition is the arrangement of elements in a picture, if I were to draw a character standing with leaves blowing, the positioning of the leaves and the frame and how I use the leaves the lead the eyes would be considered the composition.

Shape design is the SHAPES you use in an image. Using interesting shapes for the leaves would be considered the design element.

>>2845056
You are stuck on some rigid idea of what composition is. I'm merely telling you to start thinking more creatively about it and that in a way, everything that leads the eye of the audience is composition.

I'm not saying composition and design are literally the same in all aspects, that was never the fucking point to begin with. But that if you think about those concepts in a more abstract way, they ARE pretty much interchangeable because they overlap in their purpose. Shape design is used to create both appealing shapes and to lead the eye through the figure. Artists use lots of different words to describe this. Huston tends to talk about the "story" of the figure for example, which is still the same thing. Composition. Various gesture teachers talk about this concept in depth. I'd recommend Mattesi's dynamic life drawing for animators to learn more about this, because as you said, no one should take neither my nor your word for it.

Kinda. Composition as part of a design and narrative + application of proper and interesting perspective.

It's especially funny when you do life drawing, how much simple tweaks can change things, like adjusting the lighting or moving the piece from still life a bit closer to others.

>>2842806
The thing that separates the boys from the adults is realisation that focusing on one specific atribute is retarded and that every part of your work, including composition must fucking work together to make a complete piece

>>2842862
This

>>2847790
Explain

Good compositional skills can't be learned. This is where innate talent will show.

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>>2842806

> composition
Shading followed by value, lightsource, rendering, understanding gravity, the action line, the "hanging on horizon"

> seperating boys from adults
Perspective and avoiding drawing flat is the step forward.