What is composition? - Roughs

The main thing I wanted to achieve in these roughs before the session was a basic sense of foreground, mid-ground and background, as I feel I don't pay enough attention to the background in my work and how equally important each of those sections is in an illustration. I enjoyed this because it feels playful and you can focus more on telling a story or creating a mood through how you arrange the elements together rather than just on solely what each element looks like on its own. My three focus points I chose were a knight, a sword, and a tree/trees (I was admittedly reading some Game of Thrones before starting this task). I chose them because I feel that together they have a sort of immediacy in terms of story, Knights are associated with adventure/heroism, swords are associated with old fashioned conflict, and in a woodland setting they all create a sense of sort of fantasy. This simple idea really helped me visualise the scene a lot better when it came to composing the roughs, as I think it's much easier to percieve a character with a distinct look and assumed personality running around in an established area with an object that connotes certain story tropes and traditions, than it is to throw three random objects together and have them interact compositionally in an interesting way that says something.

My main objective was really just to tell a funny little story with the arrangement of the three elements while trying to encompass the foreground, middle-ground and background equally to make a more well balanced image.