Review: The Big Painting Challenge - Episode 3

More commentary on The Big Painting Challenge - which this week was in Oxfordshire. Episode 3 was all about Still Life - which I personally think might have been more accurately described as being about perspective and proportion. It went from an arrangement of still life objects to painting the facade of Blenheim Palace!

You've got 29 days left to watch it on iPlayer.

The Big Painting Challenge - Episode 3 on iPlayer on my iPad Mini.

Episode 3: The Still Life Challenges

A still life is a group of several inanimate objects grouped together, often with an over-arching theme

The challenges were again very challenging!

• a four hour painting in acrylics of a still life arrangement of objects personal to the artist
• a 30 minute Quick Draw of giant chess pieces on an outside chess board in black and white chalks. The aim was to capture perspective, proportion and tone. It was a challenge which I think would have got many artists running for the hills within that time scale!
• a 3 hour artwork in the medium of their choice of the facade of Blenheim Palace! This one would have many a professional painter feeling pretty challenged. Those who felt swamped by it had by sympathies! I'm not quite sure how this one qualified as a still life. Most buildings don't move too much - although the light does!

What was interesting was that the extent of experience that the participants bring to bear on the subject matter is reflected very clearly in the choices they make in terms of set-up, scale and composition - before they even start painting!

In relation to the set-up of the still life, Lachlan emphasised four factors that the painters all needed to address the fundamentals of creating a strong picture

1. create strong composition
2. balance out their colours
3. suggest  illusion of natural light
4. convince us that objects have three dimensions

Working out the placement - and, by definition, the four lines that go round their subject matter - seemed to be something that some people lacked skills and confidence in. (see my blog post on this topic - Composition - the four most important lines)

I was actually very surprised to hear that some of them had never done a still life or done very little and/or never really painted using the media they chose. I simply can't imagine being filmed for BBC1 doing something I've never done before!

I haven't been practicing with watercolours, although I did get a book out from the Library..... I'm enjoying finding out how to do it but learning on the job is perhaps not ideal in this situation!
Claire Parker

The fact that it was clear that people could have practiced their still life - but didn't - made me wonder why they made life difficult for themselves. If you take a look at Paul Bells's website you can see "one he made earlier". I'm saying that in the sense that the positions of objects and the colours in the shadows are different. This is his blog post about Episode 3

I was very comfortable with my painting, the hours of practise paying dividendsPaul Bell

I was also really surprised to learn that Paul Bell had previously worked as an architectural illustrator. I guess that accounts for why he's way out in front in the skills department!

Judges comments

The Judges also considered that some of the artists had made life very difficult for themselves in terms of:

• the objects they had chosen
• objects which were very shiny and difficult to paint, 
• objects which were very dissimilar in size and shape - and therefore difficult to meld together into an interesting composition
• their ability to draw their objects and achieve the right size and shape

They also observed that artists varied in their skills in putting objects together to create a strong composition.

They liked the artists who controlled tone and managed to describe the 3D aspects of their objects - particularly in relation to perspective and depth - and those who had clearly thought about what they were doing.

The conclusion

Richard Salter really impressed in this episode. With every challenge he seemed to do better than I was expecting based on previous performance. It was great to see him introduce colour in the last challenge.

It struck me that both Paul and Anthea made a really smart move in demonstrating their abilities in a new media.  I had Anthea identified as possibly being at risk this week. However she applied herself in a  much more focused way this week and also worked in pen and ink and watercolour and was rewarded by taking herself out of the frame.

The judges also seemed to like those who went on a journey and tried new things (Richard and Claire) - and made a good attempt at using their new approach (colour and watercolour respectively)

I think this episode provided some very clear tips for those selected for subsequent series of this painting.

Here's what I noted down as being some of the lessons learned in this episode:

• make sure you've tried painting all the different types of subject matter
• master the basics in different media
• become skilled in observation 
• learn how to draw accurately
• give yourself challenges in terms of shape, proportion and tone
• develop your abilities in the use of colour and composition 
• think hard about what you want the end product to look like before you start
• practice your still life before you start on site
• think about how you can demonstrate your versatility with different media
• don't focus on what you don't like - focus on what you can do

One could tell that Alison, Heather and Anne were in the frame just from the amount of time devoted to their experience of the challenges this week. Heather in particular seemed to be very fed up by the end of the day. However I must confess I thought Amy was going to be one of the two going home based on some of the comments made in the challenges.

My prediction for the next episode

Episode four is all about Human Form and Movement so I'd expect those who dislike drawing and painting people to have a problem

Paul continues to be way out in front. Richard and Claire have demonstrated their ability to have a go and pull it off - plus they were all on the better side of average in Episode 2 (Portraits). I think they're all safe.

I don't know if I've misjudged Amy in terms of expecting her to go this week. I certainly haven't seen everything the judges saw.  I think it's very definitely the case that I'm struggling as Amy's style of painting is not one which I'm a fan of - and that's purely a question of taste.

Anthea seems to become a lot more focused and seems to be intent on pleasing the judges rather than being flamboyant. On that basis I think she might well be OK.  There again there's a rather ominous segment within the film at the start of each episode where Daphne Todd makes a remark about some flamenco dancers (next week's third challenge) - and I think it relates to Anthea - so maybe not OK?

I'm not convinced that Daphne thinks Anne can draw or likes her style which tends towards the flat and graphic - although it's very clear that Lachlan likes her use of colour. It's entirely possible she will be a candidate for departure next week. However she clearly demonstrates an ability to listen and to address issues that are raised - and that's something judges always like!

James Hobbs, Anne Blankman-Hemans and Katherine Tyrrell
at the Mall Galleries "Meet the Author" event this week

I met Anne during the week - when she came to my booksigning at the Mall Galleries - and bought my book Sketching 365.

You can see her on the right with me and fellow author James Hobbs and his book.

I was very pleased to hear that she has been carrying a sketchbook and doing a lot more drawing since the programme.

The good news is that, once the series has finished, she has agreed to give me an interview for this blog. I shall endeavour to find out what it was really like to be an amateur artist painting while being filmed by the BBC!

My drawings from the weekend

Again - in the spirit of participation - I'm going to share my own drawings from last week.

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon drawing with London Urban Sketchers at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

It was so very nice and sunny that I sat in the courtyard in the sun drawing all the other people sitting in the sun!

I should add that I avoided trying to draw the architecture of the building because I've tried that before at the V&A and it's very, very challenging! So I decided I'd use my time to better effect and focused in on something I felt more comfortable doing - drawing people. They were my "still life"!

For those who've got my book you might want to take a look at pages 86-87 in which I provide some tips about drawing large groups of people.

Any time you're in a situation like this you have, in effect, got free models for practising your life drawing - except they are apt to move around a bit and do have a tendency to just get up and walk away.  The fact I don't know them and don't have their permission to draw them means I don't ever draw faces in detail.

The trick is to find one or two people who become your measuring sticks for everybody else. I started with the chap who was sat against the outside corner of the building and noted how he related in size to the cornicing.

I then moved to a single woman sat on her own on the steps just to the right and below him and drew her in relation to him....

...and then continued across the page drawing people in and relating each to the other. That way I get less worried that I've lost their relative proportion. In fact I have got some wrong - but they're not so wrong that it jumps out at you - I think!

Sunny afternoon in March - Courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum
pen and sepia ink in A4 Moleskine (11" x 16")

I then sketched three London Urban Sketchers who were sketching the architecture. That's Jean Edwards on the left and Pavel Miller on the right.

London Urban Sketchers sketching in the V&A Courtyard 7 March 2015
pen and sepia ink in large Moleskine

Composition - why tonal values and contrast are important

A walk on the Downs - a work in progress coloured pencil on Arches HP, 10" x 8" copyright images and text by Katherine Tyrrell

"Tonal values are critical. The lights and darks contribute more to the success of a painting's composition than any other factor, including color. In fact your painting will really only be as good as the tonal values" Greg Albert, The Simple Secret to Better Panting

Time and time again when entering a gallery, the painting which stands out from the crowd is the one which has a strong design and value pattern. Exactly the same thing happens when you sit viewing slides entered for a competition. Or if you visit an artist's website or shop/auction site and view thumbnail images in an online gallery. What you see initially is the abstracted pattern . Everything else - including all the detail - is subordinate in terms of impact. What gets really interesting is that when you have learned how to extract values from the morass of colour and complexity of shapes that you see everyday, then you start to see the world in design terms and paintable pictures. It's actually very entertaining - if a tad distracting when you're driving! What is value?

Value - An element of art that refers to luminance or luminosity — the lightness or darkness of a color. This is important in any polychromatic image, but it can be more apparent when an image is monochromatic, as in many drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, and photographs. This is commonly the case in much sculpture and architecture too. ArtLex

What is a value scale? A value scale is a way of describing how values change between black and white. You can construct a value scale in any number of ways - and people have. One of the most well known is the Denman Ross nine step value scale. This was devised in 1907. You can see that one of the terms he uses to describe the different values is ' higlight' - which is one which artists use all the time. Some artists recommend locating your darkest dark and lightest light prior to starting a painting. If you use the right value, the colour will tend to read true to the value pattern of your subject no matter what it is. What are value intervals? A value interval is the space inbetween a change in value. The above chart has regular (ie equal) value intervals. Greg Albert and others recommend having unequal value intervals in a painting. This means not all areas relating to a particular value are same shape or size as that relating to other values. A good way of remembering this is Greg Albert's 'mostly, some and a bit' formula which is explained in his book. What is a value pattern? Cosmo (my Somali cat) kindly obliged by posing and can be seen here modelling an example of a value pattern! ;) Note this pattern has three values in shapes which are an unequal size. The value pattern:

• enables you to see that this is a furry cat even though you only have shape definition and values to use in identifying what you are looking at.
• Colours could be changed - but so long as the values remained the same you'd know it was a cat.
• This value pattern has a:
• dominant value - dark chocolate colour
• middle value - milk chocolate colour
• least dominant value - pale peach colour.

What helps to make value patterns work? Value is a critical element in the design of a painting. Value also needs to be related and integrated with the other elements and principles of design and composition. Here are some ways in which you can design value patterns which make a painting attractive and/or interesting to the eye:

• SQUINT!
• Lesson #1 for those trying to see values is that if you squint you will see value patterns - although squinting tends to reveal the pattern rather than the true value. It enables you to lose all the detail and to some extent the colour leaving just the values. So squint when you're looking for a strong design (in a landscape/still life/portrait) and squint when you're assessing whether your work has a strong value pattern.
• Lesson #2 only applies to those of us who wear glasses. Take your glasses off and look again at your subject or painting. You'll lose the detail so it isn't competing for your attention and will have a simpler view of subject or painting.
• focus on the big shapes and the abstract pattern of flat values. Start by identifying three, four or five shapes of different size and unequal weight (in the light/dark sense). Simple works best. Unequal numbers can work better than even. Start big and simple, work towards smaller shapes and more detail. If you start with detail you'll often lose the value pattern.
• let what interested you inform decisions about the weight and balance of values. The abstract pattern can be interesting in itself - but the reasons behind why selected a specific subject can often be different. Integrating the two helps to make a painting work better.
• Value creates mood and contrast creates drama - see this example by Rembrandt
• design or find lighting arrangements which make the value pattern more interesting. You don't have to work with what presents at face value. You can:
• choose to work plein air at different times of the day.
• set up lighting arrangements to work indoors and from life. (see How to create a lightbox)
• move your subject around to find the light which gives the most attractive composition.
• Rembrandt lighting is often used in portraiture
• organise transitions in value according to how light behaves
• Art Studio Chalk board has a good demonstration of how this works for spheres.
• use a monochromatic thumbnail sketch to identify alternative ways of using values in relation to the big shapes. You can change or switch values around - if the background is light try making it dark.

An example - plein air sketching As anybody who has sketched plein air will know, the clouds move and the light changes! The trick in creating a sketch which works well is to wait until the light works or to plan to be in place when you have a good chance of experiencing light which helps with value patterns design. One approach is to work early in the morning or late in the day when the sun is low and produces interesting shadows. In the middle of the day, one often needs to wait a while and observe how the light moves in order to see what might work well. Making a quick thumbnail sketch of what attracted you to the way the light falls helps enormously with completing a painting. You can also make quick thumbnails of how the light changes while painting. It maybe be that you'll see something better as the day progresses.

• try introducing a strong value contrast. This works especially well in identifying a focus point.
• Chiaroscuro (Italian for clear-dark) is a term in art for a contrast between light and dark.

• use one dominant value. Assessments will need to be made about the relative balance with other values.
• weight values to one end or the other of the value range
• if very light values dominate then the painting is referred to as 'high key' - a few low key marks will draw the eye

Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 1862 James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) Oil on canvas; 83 7/8 x 42 1/2 in. (213 x 107.9 cm) Salon des Refusés, 1863 National Gallery of Art, Washington, Harris Whittemore Collection 1943.6.2

• dominance by very dark values creates a 'low key' painting - high key marks immediately draw the eye

Venetian Interior, c. 1880-82 John Singer Sargent, (American, 1856-1925) oil on canvas, 26 7/8 X 34 3/16 in. (63.3 X 86.8 cm) Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

• always consider the background value behind a subject.
• People sometimes start a painting with the subject matter which interests them - and then wonder what to do about the background. This is a 'bad habit' which tends to be very common among artists who are starting out and/or have little formal training and/or skipped some of the chapters in the art instruction book. It's important to know why it's a bad habit and why it actively works against a painting being made as effective as possible
• Background have values as well as shapes and colours. If you subscribe to the notion that to hava painting with impact you have to design a painting, then the background MUST be considered as part of the overall equation - of the balance of values, shapes, colours etc - from the very beginning. Its value (and shape and colour) will affect everything else in the painting. Adding a background in at the end and designing it to work well is an incredibly difficutlt thing to do which even experienced artists struggle with.
• know and understand the values produced by your materials. It's especially helpful to know what is the value of your different paints/pastels/pencils.
• if your paint dries lighter (eg as frequently happens in watercolour) then you need to know what value it will create
• Very often pastel artists will sort their tray of pastels out into a value based arrangement. Thus value dominates the arrangements and then colour.
• Try inspecting how experienced artists lay out their palettes - you'll often notice that it has a value bias.

Here are some websites and/or blog posts by people who have emphasised the importance of value to composition.

• ArtLex: Value - includes a discussion about luminosity
• Handprint has a wealth of information about values including:
• the dominance of value
• the value scale
• hue, lightness and saturation
• the artist's value wheel
• grayscales & gamut mapping
• painting values
• Studio Chalkboard: Grayscale and Planar Values
• John Carlson wrote an influential book Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting. Chapter 4 'Design' concerns itself with a pattern of differenting values. The link is to an online version of parts of the book. (I can hear Robyn planning reading time!)
• Handprint (Handprint) devotes part of his site to value - and has some interesting demonstrations of its importance to design
• Ed Terpening (Life Plein Air) made some observations on painting on his blog in 2007:
• Observation 2 - work in abstractions. It contains a number of tips for working with value and abstractions.
• Observation 7 - value
• Linda Blondheim (Landscapes of the South)
• has been studying Notan and using it in her paintings
• and has some tips about using Notan to find values

Composition: tools to help find and assess value and tone This section repeats part of Composition and Design - finding and creating a focal point (24 January 2008) and is repeated here for the sake of completeness and this post being read out of sequence.

• the Val-U-Viewer value finder. An instant hit with all the artists when introduced to it by sally Strand. You can read about by clicking the first link. You can also see one on my website. Red acetate is really very useful!
• Thumbnails:
• thumbnail sketches in 3 values (or 5 values) - see Composition and Design - Resources for Artists for tips on how to do this as the blog post about how to do this comes later!
• reducing a digital image of your work down to a thumbnail size often provides a check of whether the value pattern is registering. This will also be covered in the post which follows.
• Notan:
• Use the Notan approach advocated by Arthur Wesley Dow to focus on values and the impact of positive and negative shapes with different values. Notan tends to empphasise the use of two or three values only

• You can learn a little more and also see how I worked with value studies last year in Learning about Notan #1, #2 and #3.
• You can read more about it in Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers.
• Greyscale:
• enables you to see the value pattern in monochromatic form (black, gres, white). This helps people who have difficulty in seeing values because they get distracted by colour. It also helps you to learn about the values of different colours.
• Composition - using PS Elements to help with design provides a brief overview of how to use greyscale in PS Elements
• Read about greyscale on Wikipedia

• Working with Values:
• Adobe Photoshop Elements enables you to reduce a reference photo (or a scan of your work so far) to up to 8 values using the cutout tool. This is what I've been using for my notan work - and the blog post on that will follow very soon! I've been using it since version 3 and I'm now on version 5! For a basic description of how to use it see Composition - using PS Elements to help with design
• Artellmedia provide a software programme called Artworks Basic - which seeks to aid composition and provides scope to determine what a digital picture looks like in different numbers of values. It have a sophisticated way of showing you where the different values are. Only listed as being suitable for computers up to XP and I've not yet tried to load it on my new Vista Laptop yet - but the originators don't think it'll be a problem.

Links: Making a Mark Composition Project - see below for earlier posts relating to this project

• Composition and Design - Resources for Artists
• Composition and Design - An Introduction
• Composition - The Elements of Design
• Composition - Principles of Design
• Greg Albert - The Simple Secret to Better Painting
• Composition and Design - A Digest #1
• Composition and Design - finding and creating a focal point
• Composition - the four most important lines
• Composition - thinking in threes
• Composition - using PS Elements to help with design

Copyright - all rights reserved in relation to text and images belonging to the artist

Composition - The Elements of Design

It's amazing how many of us who don't have the benefit of a fine art degree seem to have managed to learn something about the different aspects of what's involved with composition and design without actually ever coming across the idea of the 'elements' and 'principles' of art/composition/design! Or at least that's my experience. I'd certainly never heard about these particular groups before starting this project. Maybe this is what they teach you if you do an Fine Art degree? ;)

What is composition and design?

Composition: The plan, placement or arrangement of the elements of art in a work. It is often useful to discuss these in reference to the principles of design, as well as to the relative weight of the composition's parts.
Art Lex

OK - so what are the elements and what are the principles?

A useful analogy is to think of the 'elements' as being the ingredients part of a recipe for success and the 'principles' as being the method part. Miss out either and you can't bake a cake or make a picture which fulfils coventional western ideals of what a picture should look like. Some of the ingredients affect the 'flavour' of the piece while others are intrinsic to the structure and body of the work.

elements of art or elements of design - The basic components used by the artist when producing works of art. Those elements are color, value, line, shape, form, texture, and space. The elements of art are among the literal qualities found in any artwork.
ArtLex

principles of design or principles of art - Certain qualities inherent in the choice and arrangement of elements of art in the production of a work of art. Artists "design" their works to varying degrees by controlling and ordering the elements of art. Considering the principles is especially useful in analyzing ways in which a work is pleasing in formal ways. How any work exhibits applications of these principles can further or modify other characteristics of a work as well. (See definition for further details of the principles)
ArtLex

I'm going to split this introduction into two parts - one for elements and one for principles. Some of the elements and principles will then be the subject of future posts during this project while others - such as colour - will be the subject of future projects.

Interestingly, I've come across different lists in different places on the Internet and in books. Some include 'composition' as an element while other don't. Some seem to mix items up between elements and principles. Personally, I take the view that composition is what you do when you work with both elements and principles.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.
Claude Monet

I'll be quoting from ArtLex extensively because (a) it's a very good resource and (b) it tends to be comprehenive while other sites can sometimes be rather partial.

I also recommend that you take a look at the links I'm collecting in Composition and Design - Resources for Artists - which now contains a section devoted to elements and principles. I'll be developing other modules for the different components.

Bsides the books listed at the end, other good resources include:

• Associate Professor Charlotte Jirousek's website on the Cornell Website which provides a very good introduction to elements and principles as part of her online interactive textbook Cornell University - Art, Design and Visual Thinking - it also has an excellent set of images to accompany the text
• Graphic Design Basics - which cover both Elements of Design and Principles of Design - no images but very succinct and easy to print off for educaitonal purposes
  
• Nancy Doyle's series of lessons on composition - which you can find links to either at the end of this post or in Composition and Design - Resources for Artists

The Elements of Design and Composition

The elements of design are the building blocks - they provide the structure for a design or an artwork.

Value

Value - An element of art that refers to luminance or luminosity — the lightness or darkness of a color. Value is an especially important element in works of art when color is absent. This is particularly likely with drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, and photographs. It is also true with most sculpture and architecture.
ArtLex: Value

Values in two dimensional artwork create gradations in light and contrast - and without these everything would be flat. Values can be created in different ways - by line and by colour.

To my mind, value is the most important element in the design of a painting. Without values there is no design. It's more important than colour because there are great works of art which have no colour and value can be a component of colour but colour isn't a component of value per se.

"The first things to study are form and values. For me, these are the things that are the basics of what is serious in art. Color and finish put charm in one's work."
Jean Baptiste Corot (1796-1875), French painter. Keith Roberts, Corot, 1965.

There will be more about value in subsequent posts. Aids to composition include greyscales or value scales.

Colour

An element of art with three properties: (1) hue or tint, the color name, e.g., red, yellow, blue, etc.: (2) intensity, the purity and strength of a color, e.g., bright red or dull red; and (3) value, the lightness or darkness of a color.
ArtLex: Colour

Colour will be the subject of another of my projects later this year. You can see links to information on the Internet which has already been collected in Colour - Resources for Artists

Shape

Shape - An element of art, it is an enclosed space defined and determined by other art elements such as line, color, value, and texture. In painting and drawing, shapes may take on the appearance of solid three-dimensional object even though they are limited to two dimensions — length and width. This two-dimensional character of shape distinguishes it from form, which has depth as well as length and width.
ArtLex: Shape

Both form and shape require space (see below) to exist - shape needs at least two dimensions while form requires three. Two dimensional shapes can be defined by lines alone or values alone.

Notan defines three dimensional forms in terms of two dimensional shapes and values.

Form

Form - In its widest sense, total structure; a synthesis of all the visible aspects of that structure and of the manner in which they are united to create its distinctive character. The form of a work is what enables us to perceive it.Form also refers to an element of art that is three-dimensional (height, width, and depth) and encloses volume. For example, a triangle, which is two-dimensional, is a shape, but a pyramid, which is three-dimensional, is a form. Cubes, spheres, ovoids, pyramids, cone, and cylinders are examples of various forms.
ArtLex: Form

Forms can be organic and natural or constructed. Either can be geometric in form. Artists often talk about finding the 'big shapes' when starting a composition - but the shapes might be three dimensional forms. You can 'abstract' from a natural object to find its geometric equivalent - eg an apple is a sphere.

Space

An element of art that refers to the distance or area between, around, above, below, or within things. It can be described as two-dimensional or three-dimensional; as flat, shallow, or deep; as open or closed; as positive or negative; and as actual, ambiguous, or illusory.
Artlex: Space

Positive space is the space taken up by objects. Negative space is the space inbetween objects. Focusing on the latter often enables us to see the true relationship between different objects. Empty space can be highly regarded in some art forms and cultures and is exemplified above in this sculpture by Henry Moore currently on display as part of an exhibition of his work at Kew Gardens.

Line

line - A mark with length and direction(-s). An element of art which refers to the continuous mark made on some surface by a moving point. Types of line include: vertical, horizontal, diagonal, straight or ruled, curved, bent, angular, thin, thick or wide, interrupted (dotted, dashed, broken, etc.), blurred or fuzzy, controlled, freehand, parallel, hatching, meandering, and spiraling. Often it defines a space, and may create an outline or contour, define a silhouette; create patterns, or movement, and the illusion of mass or volume. It may be two-dimensional (as with pencil on paper) three-dimensional (as with wire) or implied (the edge of a shape or form).
ArtLex: Line

Lines in visual art do not have to be on canvas or paper. They can be marks made within the environment.

Texture

texture- An element of art, texture is the surface quality or "feel" of an object, its smoothness, roughness, softness, etc. Textures may be actual or simulated. Actual textures can be felt with the fingers, while simulated textures are suggested by an artist in the painting of different areas of a picture
ArtLex - Texture

Texture can be represented in visual artworks in either two or three dimensional ways. It's often a pictorial illusion - which is dependent on line and value.

Books with a good explanation of the elements of design

• "The Elements of Drawing" John Ruskin (1857) and never out of print!
  
• You can search the text for specific terms on this Ruskin College Oxford website
  
• Letter 1 concerns the basics of drawing which involve the elements
  
• Letter 3 concerns itself with "On Colour and Composition" and Ruskin's 9 laws
  
• scroll down to see all the information that is available on the Internet.
  
• It appears you can download a complete copy from the Canadian Libraries.
  
• If you want to buy a copy, then I recommend that you get this edition with editing and annotations by Bernard Dunstan.
  
• "The Simple Secret to Better Painting" Greg Albert (Paperback 2003)- if you buy one book for this project, make it this one.
  

Links to sites which provide further information

• Composition and Design - Resources for Artists - includes a section of the elements and principles of composition and design
  
• Cornell University - Art, Design and Visual Thinking an online interactive textbook created by Associate Professor Charlotte Jirousek
• Navigate to the Elements of Design and Principles of Design (and see the rest of the textbook) using the menu in the left hand column
  
• Graphic Design Basics
• Elements of Design
• Principles of Design
  
• Nancy Doyle: Design Lesson IV: Elements of Design
  
• Wikipedia - Design Elements and Principles This Wikipedia article is rather limited in its explanation and seems to confuse elements and principles. NOT recommended. The folowing articles are also very basic - the subject matter is covered better on other websites
  
• Wikipedia - Elements of Art
• Wikipedia - Principles of Art

[Note: I'm going to publish this but am searching around for some images which add value to add in to this post. Check back again later if you want to see what I found!]