When Designing an Illustration, How Much Does Studying the Final Composition Matter?
Let’s find out together in this article 🙂
In these few lines, I’d like to summarize some tips and ideas to improve the composition of an illustration, leaving it here as a reminder for myself too 😉
If you’ve read other posts on my blog, you probably already know how much work goes into every single image created for a picture book, a children’s book, a special gift, a custom portrait, or a private commission. It’s not just the drawing itself that makes an illustration beautiful and effective; many other factors come into play: the choice of color palette, the format, the details, the composition, and the framing.
For every illustration, you can explore infinite compositional solutions. The first question we need to ask ourselves is always:
“What do we want to express and represent? What is the true subject of our illustration?”
The answer to this question will allow us to choose, out of many possible options, the most effective composition to convey that specific message. In this regard, we can learn a lot from fields closely related to illustration, such as photography, cinema, and painting.
Framing and Choosing a Composition
When we take a photo, it is much easier to think about which framing to choose, simply because we are already looking at the world through a “window”: the viewfinder or a phone screen. We should do exactly the same for our illustrations: try enclosing our composition within different formats and crops.
Years ago, when my children were little, they attended a brief basic photography course. As a game, the teacher had them use a small cardboard frame to teach them how to “frame” the world around them.
Below, I’ll show you several examples of different framings and compositions, all starting from the exact same photo.
If I wanted to emphasize the sky, I could crop the photo leaving the horizon line lower; conversely, if I wanted to highlight the meadow, I would keep it higher. But let’s look at the geometric rules that help us make these choices.
The Rule of Thirds
When it comes to the horizon, photographers and great painters of the past have always used the “rule of thirds.” This technique involves dividing the frame into nine equal rectangles using two horizontal and two vertical lines.
If your goal is to emphasize the sky, you should crop the image by placing the horizon on the lower line; if you want to give more space to the meadow, the horizon should be moved to the upper line. Similarly, the four intersection points created by the vertical and horizontal lines (one-third from the right or left) are perfect for placing the visual focal point and instantly drawing attention to an object or character.
The Golden Ratio
A similar concept applies to the golden ratio. In his book “Figure”—which I highly recommend reading if you love these topics—Riccardo Falcinelli simplifies it like this:
“You draw the diagonal of the photo and its perpendicular line passing through the opposite corner. Their intersection determines the focal point of the composition and the height of the sky.”
This is a highly refined geometric technique that has been widely used throughout art history by countless painters, all the way up to Turner and Degas.
Center and Symmetry
Of course, let’s not forget the most immediate and intuitive rule: centered composition, which places our subject perfectly in the middle of the frame.
Be careful, though: when it comes to double-page spreads in picture books, the centering rule does not work. In this case, we must always account for the central gutter (the page fold) and strictly avoid placing important elements or crucial details where they would be cut off or swallowed by the binding.
Finding Inspiration in Movie Stills
Countless examples of masterful composition can be found in cinema. For instance, I absolutely love the stills from the movie “Hugo”—I find the framing, details, and use of space to be extraordinary. As I will show you in a moment, I often use them as an exercise to practice choosing compositions for the illustrations I create for my picture books.
Below, I’ll share a few examples of movie stills so we can look at how directors use the rule of thirds or the golden ratio to build their scenes.
In the following stills, however, director Martin Scorsese used the ‘frame-within-a-frame’ technique, which allows the viewer’s attention to be drawn directly toward the ‘framed’ subject.
Choosing the Illustration Format
For an effective composition, choosing the right format is also essential: square, horizontal, or vertical. By giving more emphasis to height or width, we give a completely different meaning to our illustration. A great example of this is a very original and fun silent book, “Il Barbaro” by Renato Moriconi, which uses a very pronounced vertical format that perfectly serves the book’s narrative.
Another example is the horizontal format of the wonderful silent book “L’onda” by Suzy Lee.
Different Points of View
Another crucial choice for the final composition is the point of view: close-up, wide shot, bird’s-eye view (from above), worm’s-eye view (from below), or even using intentionally exaggerated perspectives.
With all that being said, for many of my illustrations, I try out different framings and compositions before choosing the final one. Below, you can see the study of various framings I created for this page of my picture book “Ma che brutta giornata!” Edizioni Il Ciliegio.
On the other hand, the sketches below are variations and studies done for an illustration of a picture book I am currently working on.
This is by no means an exhaustive guide to studying and organizing an illustration’s composition, as contrasts, lights and shadows, colors, lines, vectors, rhythm, and so much more are also incredibly important—and I will talk about them in future articles.
One final tip for practicing—which I often do in my own sketchbook —is to paint movie stills, photographs, or existing paintings using only large areas of black and white, or at most 3 or 4 tones. Don’t worry about the quality of the drawing; do it purely to analyze the composition, framing, and contrasts. To choose my final palette, I also create color thumbnails, and then I look at them by converting the image to black and white to check the contrast between the chosen colors. Stripping the composition down like this, with no details or particulars, really helps evaluate its effectiveness. Drawing inspiration from movies or photography is incredibly helpful because directors and photographers have already done the heavy lifting of thinking through and planning the frames they chose.
For this exercise, I find the website FILM-GRAB extremely useful. It contains a massive archive of movie stills from countless famous films, perfect for getting inspired by their compositions and framing.
I hope these quick tips are helpful to you! If you have any questions or doubts, let me know in the comments, and follow me on Youtube and Instagram to stay updated on future videos and articles. See you soon!
Below, I’m leaving a few useful book references for you:
“Figure” by Riccardo Falcinelli – Einaudi Edizioni
“Fotografia Creativa” by Franco Fontana – Mondadori
“L’occhio del fotografo” by Michael Freeman – Logos Edizioni
“La trilogia del limite” by Suzy Lee – Corraini Edizioni
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E se hai una bella storia da propormi per illustrarla sarei molto felice di parlarne insieme! 🙂
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Se vuoi vedere altri libri per bambini sui quali ho lavorato: LIBRI PER BAMBINI – PORTFOLIO
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