It’s a new year!

As every single one, I have too many things I want to learn and practice and they have to fit in incredibly small windows of time.

It’s ok, better a small something everyday than unachievable goals that only ends up in frustration and procrastination.

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QUICK BACKSTORY

I was at friends home during these winter holidays, watching together some videos on internet.

We were, in particular, listening to this person – https://www.youtube.com/@patrickhwillems – explaining why he consider trains being the summit of any action story in movies.

If you are a train fan, an action movie fan, or both, you might enjoy these so I’m leaving the link underneath.

He surely had some valid points there.

I suddenly realized a thing: these collections of online videos are exactly what I could base my studies on this year.

Select a video that feature “best scenes”, “top 10 scenes” etc related to a particular genre. Then studying it to improve my knowledge of composition (as a main focus).

As always, any exercise leaves you more insight than what’s related to its focus. But it’s good to have one, so we can avoid dispersing our energies on unrelated things.

For example, for this exercise I am not interested in observing tridimensionality and rendering.

To start my 2025 practice, I chose to start with the “action” genre. And since I am a long term Marvel fans, let’s start with Marvel movies, why not!

It is absolutely important to study classics and masterpieces, nonetheless is also important to have a grasp of more contemporary film making and, above everything, doing something you find fun!

Believe me, you perform 2 times better when you do something you actually enjoy.

I would say, keep part of your time to do something fun and part to discover great artists out of your comfort zone. That way, you should be able to learn a lot of amazing things, without the feeling of being forced to do something.

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THE EXERCISE ITSELF

That said, I started with “Captain America – The Winter Soldier”!

This is something that I do often to improve as a concept artist with composition and value structure. It can also be beneficial for an incredible number of art jobs like, among others, storyboard art and comics.

This is what I set for this practice time:

• 8 frames a day
• 30 minutes to maximum an hour
• 3 values
• Flat colors
• Big solid brush
• Working as zoomed out as possible

As you can see below the thumbnails are pretty lose. No need for perfect lines or polished rendering if they are not the focus of your practice.

You notice all sorts of interesting things when you do these little thumbnails.

Here, for example, you can see how much of an MVP is a car to stage… Basically everything.

• To create diagonals
• To point at things
• To frame a scene
• To create balance
• To create depth

They are a great assets in street scenes. You expect them to be everywhere, they come in all sorts of colors and shapes. They are the urban jolly of composition.

A different fun thing you can notice, while doing this exercise, is how much we perceive big the presence of the screen of a human being, VS how big is in reality.

While calibrating the proportions you are there thinking: this should be bigger. When is really not.

Why do we perceive it like this?

Well, for start we give the maximum importance to a human figure, wherever it may be. It’s our focus, is something we do following our instinct.

The artist composing the scene knows this really well and can make it seem even bigger in presence with the careful use of composition and contrasts.

It’s really fascinating!

By the way, if you want to use the same video I used for this exercise, this is the link:

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IN CONCLUSION

And this is it from me today.

To summarize how to improve with small windows of practice time:

• Decide how long you can spend every day on a warm up / quick practice
• Choose a subject you want to improve in
• Try to reduce the focus of the exercise to 1 key point (in my example, the study of composition) followed from an eventual second supporting aspect (again, in my exercise, the 3 value structure)
• Give yourself smaller goals (in my case: I divided “composition in movie frames” into movie genres; once selected a specific category – action – I started with a branch of those movies I enjoy > MCU).

I will keep working on this in the next weeks and, if this was interesting let me know. I would be happy to create another post with the analysis of the scenes I studied.

What you are working on? Did you learn something valuable? Leave a message or a link in the comments if you’d like to share your works and experiences!