Customer Reviews

Composing pictures

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This is one of those books artists and animators should really check out. This 418-page book collects the art theories and teachings of Don Graham, who was the art instructor for Disney. The book has been out of print for a long time so it's great that it's being reprinted.

There are 35 chapters talking about principles and approaches to creating art. The text is concise, and the principles taught are timeless. Each chapter covers from the basics and complex inner workings of great pictures.

These lessons are accompanied by hundreds of illustrated examples and paintings of great artists from different cultures and styles. Through these examples, you can see the principles as applied by various artists, and the common graphic elements and techniques used.

Basically, with this book, you understand why some pictures work, and why some don't. While watching animation on TV, you'll probably begin to see the reasons why scenes and characters are staged in a particular way.

This is an invaluable book for reference. Highly recommended to artists and animators.

If you are an artist this is indispensable for the library. Graham is a veteran and teaches the principles of composition to be applied to the static and moving image. This is a thick book with over 400 pages. The pages are laid out in an interesting way with about the bottom 1/3 containing the text, the top 2/3 containing the examples and illustrations. I like this format and it makes it easier to read. Highly recommended.

This is the single best, most comprehensive volume on the practice and theory of art that I have ever read. These foundations are applicable across all mediums, and even subjects, from abstract to representational. One of the few true "must read" books in the field.

Book presents the early foundations for many fields of study related to graphics, 3D game processing, and video image processing. Well written and logical flow.

Here's the deal, gentle reader: when evaluating Don Graham's Composing Pictures, you can listen to really high praise for its author from such animation greats as Chuck Jones, Marc Davis, and Shamus Culhane. Or you can heed a warning from an unestablished newcomer with a questionable degree of native talent (that would be yours truly). Of course, this will sound like a no-brainer, but before you race your mouse over to your Buy with 1-Click button, please hear me out.

In the first place, consider that you do not have a chance to look inside this book online. Had I done so, I think a glance at only one or two pages would have caused me to write it off--despite all the heady hosannahs. The book is a thick folio-sized tome in which the top 2/3 of each page contains illustrations and the remainder is a strip of commentary. The book has two problems: one of them is the illustrations. The other is the text. Whoops, sorry, I just damned the whole book, didn't I?

The illustrations fall into two distinct camps: singles of dubious relevance from the Greatest Hits of Art History--from Lascaux to Mark "something that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room" Rothko--and many rough sketches perpetrated by the author. At best, the latter are workmanlike or indifferent: a simple doodle of a cylinder in perspective is perfectly representative. Generally, though, the original artwork is just primitive to the point of being slovenly. As for the motley collection of fine art, the reader will have to honestly ask himself whether he believes that a working (representational) artist has anything to learn from a Rothko painting composed of nothing more than three fat smudges.

Which brings us to the problem of text. I opened the book purely at random, and present you this characteristic morsel of wisdom from page 121: "The light matrix picture is a graphic conglomerate made up of white or light colors which hold together isolated areas of dark... The slightest misplacement or overstatement of a dark immediately becomes apparent." Or page 128: "... we take a static point, which represents a position in space, and change it into a graphic area... We find that this area takes on a special and magic property--it becomes an areal passage." Page after weary page, we are oppressed like this by the displacement of calm artistry with con artistry. Yes, this is content matter for those who enjoy mental self-stimulation of the venial kind. It's written in the vague, passive-voice style characteristic of 1960's bureaucrats which succeeds in slowing down reader comprehension.

Understand that this is a book about composing pictures in which The Rule of Thirds is not even mentioned! The Golden Section is covered, but in a typically cursory and overcomplicated way. And don't even dare suggest that the author dirty his hand with such mundane realities as the aspect ratios of the actual film formats of his era. Animation is mentioned at the end, as little more than "a series of related pictures."

So to actually learn something about layout, put your money elsewhere: Dream Worlds by Hans Bacher; Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer van Sijll; Framed Ink by Marcos Mateu-Mestre; or All About Techniques in Drawing for Animation Production--any of which are excellent. (Note I recommend you not invest in Ed Ghertner's downright fraudulent Layout and Composition for Animation, which hardly covers the proposed topic.)

The final question is how Donald Graham's abomination earned such praise from brilliant animators. Well, I suppose the 1970s were different times with different standards, and there must not have been much competition for books on this subject. Everything has changed now, so don't waste your valuable time on this dreary relic.