This is the Holy Grail of Landscape Composition!

Streamline is taking sign-ups for a painting trip to many of the same places – but there only about a dozen spots left – head over here for details.

Egar Payne wrote one of the “Bibles” of landscape composition (coincidentally titled “Landscape Composition”) but it’s an unreadable morass. The reason it’s so popular among artists has less to do with Payne as a writer (what a name, too!) and everything to do with his diagrams of dozens of excellent compositional designs, drawn from analyzing dozens of masterful landscape paintings by the greats..

I don’t see the need to write a lot about this. I’m not even going to make you scroll to the bottom of the page for this. Just – here you go. You’re welcome.

P.S. IMPORTANT: The way to read these diagrams is left to right. There are four pages here. Each one starts on the lefthand column with a diagram, and next to the diagram we have two examples of the compositional strategy in action. So, in the diagrams immediately above, where it says “Sustpended Steelyard,” we get a diagram on the left and two examples to the right of it showing how it might actually be used in two different paintings.

Fun exercise: See if you can identify which compositional strategies Payne used in the paintings below.