The Rule of Thirds

The rule of thirds is one great way to turn a ho-hum composition into something very appealing. It’s not the only way to compose your painting or drawing, but it’s a good one.

Deconstructing a Photo

First, let’s take a look at a photograph.

The original photo

I took this picture when my two daughters were very young. We were at a local airport, and my older daughter was being typically protective of her sister as a DC-3 was getting ready to taxi out to the runway for takeoff.

For years, I treasured this photo for the most obvious reasons: It showed the curiosity and love of my girls.

There was something else about it, though, something I couldn’t label, a quality that appealed to me in another, equally primal sense.

Was it the grass and sky? Was it the way the old-timer off to the left contrasted visually to the young ones on the right?

When I learned something about composition, I finally realized what it was. Without understanding it or even knowing it existed, I had come fairly close to composing the picture according to this so-called rule of thirds.

(If you’re an artist or a mathematician, you’re probably familiar with the Golden Rectangle, something the ancients used in architecture and other things; it’s closely related to the Fibonacci ratio used to describe many natural occurrences, like the swirl of a rose’s petals and the twist of a nautilus shell. The rule of thirds, in my opinion, works so well because it’s an approximation of the Golden Rectangle.)

How to Bore

First, let me show you how to turn a good picture into a boring one. Look at this version, just below and to the right.

Square composition . . . *yawn*

Why is it boring? First of all, it’s a square, instead of a rectangle. Rectangles conform better than squares to that ancient notion of beauty.

Worse, it puts Sarah’s head right in the middle, which is not the hot spot you might expect it to be.

Middle is cold. Middle is lost. Middle is too well balanced and frankly boring.

(The horizon is right about at the middle, too. That’s something I did while taking the picture, and there isn’t a whole lot I can do to fix that, without cropping out a lot of visual information I want to keep in. That’s all right, we’ll still make it work.)

How to Excite

So, to come up with the real “hot spots” of a picture composed by using the rule of thirds, I cropped a little bit of sky off the original photo, which got Sarah’s head at the right place vertically. It was already well placed horizontally.

How did I know how much to crop?

The Tool of Choice

I created a grid. I divided the top edge of the picture by 3 equal parts. Then, I divided the side by 3 equal parts. Where the lines intersect are the hot spots you’re looking for!

Using a Rule of 3 grid

The image on the left shows a grid imposed on the photo. The grid was a tool I created in Photoshop and used to place Sarah’s head in a hot spot. This ensured that the viewer would have the real satisfaction that such a composition creates.

The airplane isn’t in a hot spot, but its nose is on one of the lines of the grid, which is a good second-best . . . call it “a warm line.” (. . . which strikes me as kind of a funny term. If it works for you, I invite you to use it; we’ll both know what you mean.) The old-timer’s head is on that warm line, too.

What makes this composition less than stellar is the placement of the horizon, which, as I mentioned, I couldn’t change and still emphasize other interesting focal points.

Planning Your Work of Art

So, how do you use it in something you’re planning to draw or paint?

Simple: Decide where you want your viewers eye to focus and put it on or very near a hot spot on your grid. You don’t have to actually draw the grid, but do use a ruler (just for a while) to measure your canvas or the picture plane on your paper and divide the total horizontal dimension by 3. Then, do the same for the vertical dimension. Where these lines intersect are your 4 hot spots. And, as I said, the lines are “warm” places to put important details of your composition.

It won’t take long for your eye to “get it,” and measuring will soon become a thing of the past. The grid is a temporary tool.

Let’s See How I Did . . .

Now let’s use the rule-of-thirds grid to reverse-engineer a drawing I did before I knew about the rule of thirds. This is a preliminary drawing I did a long time ago for a bigger project I was planning.

Draper as a Viking

I wanted to take the great 1960s bodybuilder Dave Draper and make him a Viking. Here (on the right) is what I had when I stopped work on it.

Draper was a very well-balanced bodybuilder, back in the days before pandemic drug abuse in that sport (steroids, amphetamines, human growth hormone . . . the list is sickening). As a result, his physique had its own personality. And he not only looked — and was – strong, he looked — and was – athletic.

I could easily imagine Dave Draper at his biggest and best as a medieval warrior.

Now, consider this, when analyzing how well I composed the drawing: I wanted Dave’s right arm to be the focal point. He’s flexing the thing and looking at it, for cryin’ out loud.

If you check out the grid, you’ll see that the top-left hot spot falls right into his armpit.

The arm is warm

The composition’s not perfect, but it still works fairly well, given the detail and the high contrast in values (lightness is high value; darkness is low value) in the arms, shoulders, head, and torso. Detail, dark mass (against the light background), and contrast within the masses all draw the eye.

If I were to work on this project again, I would almost certainly utilize the rule of thirds, this time to better effect. I would also use 2 or 3 other objects within the picture plane to take the eye on a little journey around the whole picture. Draper and that right arm of his would be where the eye would keep returning. At the very least, I’d give his right elbow (on our left) a little more room.

There are some pictures that simply defy using the rule of thirds. It just doesn’t seem to work in those cases. Many times, though, it does, and you should at least consider it when planning what you’re going to draw.

Just One Tool in Your Toolbox

I’ll talk about other ways to create good compositions soon. I hope you’ll come back. Look for the alerts on my Facebook and Twitter pages (and a few others).

How will knowing the rule of thirds change what you do? Go ahead and try it today. I think you’ll find yourself liberated by conforming to this rule, not constrained!

Let me know what you think in the Comments section.

See you next time . . . draw and paint well!

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