Composition - Myself, an elephant and a butterfly

Roughs

I started this task by getting a few basic ideas down onto paper hoping that these would spark some developments for more interesting compositions. From these first two sheets I particularly like the composition on the bottom right because it has a clear line of symmetry and has a strong sense of order and structure.

Here I started to work with more landscape frames, trying to push my compositions to work within a certain space. I like the idea of having the face and the butterfly close up with the elephant as a smaller figure in the background. I think this plays with our perception of scale as we would immediately think that the elephant should be the biggest thing in the image due to its actual size in comparison to a human and a butterfly. I was thinking about what parts of each component would need to be included for it to be recognisable, for example the trunk of an elephant makes it iconic and the wings of the butterfly are its main feature. 

I had more or less decided on the composition I wanted to develop so at the end, I was playing around with slight variations. I thought about a dark sky so it looks like the elephant was disappearing into the night but then thought that adding tone to the ground and a suggestion of darkness towards the top of the sky would keep a light area along the horizon line which would keep the attention on what is going on here. 

Final Composition

Using ink for this task was quite challenging because you have to commit to where you are placing your lines. One mistake I made was making the hands too small; I know this was a task about composition and not anatomical accuracy but making the hands bigger would have also made it look more like the girl was holding the butterfly further away from her face as if it was ready to fly away. 

I think this final outcome has a sense of depth; there are two conflicting directions of movement because the girl is encouraging the butterfly to fly towards the foreground whereas the elephant is walking away into the background. To improve this image I would consider whether the whole face needs to be visible in the image. I think I may have been able to exaggerate the difference in size more by maybe only including the lower half of the face and making the butterfly bigger so it appears closer to the viewer.