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Ian Roberts — Mastering Composition (YouTube)

by Ian Roberts · YouTube

Talk-through videos on landscape composition: notan value patterns, underlying armatures, focal-point placement, and structural critiques of student work and museum paintings. Roberts has taught painting for over thirty years and wrote the book Mastering Composition.

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Composition Library

Master advanced composition techniques with Matt Kohr's Composition Library! Learn to create compelling art through proven visual principles.

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drawabox.com

Drawabox is a structured drawing fundamentals resource offering free lessons, drills, and assignments that teach basic sketching from lines and shapes, covering construction, perspective, and form. It provides instructional videos and written guides to practice shading and improve accuracy.

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line-of-action.com

Line of Action is a free drawing-practice site that provides a pose generator and photo references to help you practice gesture drawing. It offers timed sessions with customizable content—from human figures and hands to faces and animals—so you can build speed and accuracy.

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Composition of Outdoor Painting

Catalogues the recurring compositional arrangements found in outdoor pictures (steelyard, cruciform, radiating line, S-curve, group mass) with chapters on unity, balance, value pattern and depth. The named compositional arrangements give a concrete vocabulary for arranging a scene before any mark is made. Written by a plein-air painter of the Sierra Nevada.

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The Elements of Drawing (Project Gutenberg)

Three letters to beginners with graded exercises in tone, gradation, foliage, tree structure and aerial distance, all drawn from nature. Its exercise sequence trains the eye on natural subjects specifically (leaf masses, bark, distant hills) rather than studio still life. Ruskin argues observation precedes technique. Public domain text with plates, free in EPUB, HTML and plain text.

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Pencil Broadsides: A Manual of Broad Stroke Technique

Broad-stroke pencil technique applied to outdoor subjects: massing tone with the chisel edge, and rendering foliage, rocks, water, snow and skies as value shapes rather than outlines. The only widely available book that systematically teaches building landscape form from flat tonal strokes instead of contours, which is the practical bridge between value theory and an actual pencil. Free to borrow with an Internet Archive account.

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