Composition: Reinterpreting great paintings

Guide to Painting 02-003343
Dan: 'It's good to practise defining shapes using tones and colours rather than lines.' Photograph: Nick Ballon/Photographer

Duration Up to five hours, or one hour per study

Materials Palette, palette knife, colour shaper, ruler, pencils, fine liner, tracing paper, black or grey mountboard, stretched primed paper or canvas, paints: titanium white; lamp/ivory black; cadmium lemon; cadmium yellow; cadmium red; alizarin crimson; ultramarine blue; cobalt or cerulean blue

What will I learn?

Underpinning every great painting is a strong composition. Regardless of subject matter, the artist orchestrates the structure, bringing the elements into a coherent whole, or breaking its coherence to create tension. In this exercise, by studying and reinterpreting great paintings, you will gain a deeper insight into artist's creative processes. You will make a set of studies from a poster or postcard of a famous painting, or from the painting itself at an art gallery. Each study you make will address a different aspect of the painting. They could eventually feed in to a single work, either figurative or abstract. Suggested paintings include: Bacchus and Ariadne (Titian), The Madonna of the Meadow (Giovanni Bellini), The Flagellation of Christ or Legend of the True Cross (both Piero Della Francesca), Guernica (Picasso) or Bathers at Asnières (Seurat).


1. Use mountboard to create a display area for the source image you will be working from and your studies.

2. Make several colour, and black and white A4 photocopies of the chosen work and glue one of them on to the mountboard.

3. Using one copy, take a tracing-in pencil and grid up the image by drawing a diagonal line to each corner. Now draw a vertical and horizontal line, each bisecting the diagonal lines, to create four rectangular sections. Repeat this in each of the sections to create 16 smaller sections. Now grid up a painting surface.

4. Using these grids, work out the position of the key shapes in the painting and draw them on a piece of paper or canvas with a fine liner. Highlighting the key forms will hopefully reveal the work's hidden geometry or show the lines that connect key landmarks in the composition. Look for strong lines that lead the eye, such as horizontals and verticals made by architecture or horizon, and draw them in. Check for geometric forms and symmetry; triangular and cruciform relationships are common. Asymmetrical lines may be revealed, sometimes in combination with symmetrical lines.

5. Cut a small piece of primed paper to roughly A4 size. Use a black and white photocopy as source material for a greyscale painting that focuses on flat shapes rather than detail. Using your palette knife, mix five greys, with black at one end of the scale and a pale grey at the other. Use these to make a study that deals with the tonal relationships and hints at the light source, if this is applicable. Other non-linear connections between parts of the painting may be revealed, such as the repetition of a particular tone or the grouping of close tones in one part of the painting that form a powerful shape. These things could be overlooked when the painting is viewed in full colour.

6. Look at the source image again and make a colour inventory. Using your palette knife, make opaque mixtures, even if the original painting is made using glazing - you are interpreting, not copying. Place the mixtures that are adjacent on the painting close together on the palette to check their compatibility.

7. Using your palette knife or colour shaper, and without thinning, transfer the mixtures to a piece of primed paper in the relevant areas of the rectangle. This should map out the broad colour space of the original.

8. Based on this colour study, make a larger painting that deals with local colour. Again, do not thin the colour. Try not to get drawn into detail but concentrate on colour repetition and balance.

9. To take this further, use your studies to make larger-scale paintings. A copy of the original would test your understanding of colour harmony. Alternatively, create an abstract painting based on the original with the colours in the same areas.

What do the results show?

An analysis of great paintings is invaluable. A period of study will show you how the separate foundations of painting - drawing, articulation of tone and colour, geometry and rhythm - interact in successful paintings.