Sarah N's 3 balance/value/scale compositions

I thought I'd share my 3 compositions from last month.

On the left, I followed my usual tendency towards asymmetry.  I realized a couple things with this first composition.  First, I placed the big dark square off center, but this meant there was a narrow band to put pieces in under the dark square.  It was easy to let this get too congested with small contrasting value pattern, leaving the rest of the piece without many of those small scale squares.  So I learned to make that bottom strip as plain as possible and avoid a lot of contrast that draws the eye to the bottom.  As a byproduct, I also found that I needed to distribute the small scale contrasting pattern throughout the composition to encourage the eye to travel around the piece.

In the middle, I decided to fight against my asymmetric tendencies and make a roughly radially symmetric composition.  That large square in the middle is like a big black hole, so I tried to pull the attention from the large dark square by putting the darker 2nd largest squares in the 4 corners.  I made the rest of the composition mostly symmetric by placing the lighter 2nd largest squares on the middle of the sides, forming a cross when combined with the large dark square.  Then I tried to make the interstitial spaces similar in pattern.  Easier said than done with this set of squares, and like Sarah R, I combined some of the smaller squares/rectangles to make larger similarly-valued pieces that would bring me to symmetry.

For the third composition on the right, I decided to see if I could create a gradation of color in a bilaterally symmetric pattern (relative to the diagonal).  I didn't fully achieve symmetry, but as in the second piece, the deviations from symmetry create interest.  I also largely removed any small scale pattern.  The group decided that would be ok if this were one of many squares in a repeating pattern (e.g., for a quilt).

For those of you who choose to dive into this, it's definitely tough, but you learn a lot.  I found that the first composition was a lot harder because you are learning the constraints of the distribution of shape size and values.  Agter that, you have a base of knowledge to work from.