Where to put stuff (I work by feel, honestly)
Okay. Last lesson you got the far mountains sitting back where they belong, sky's in place, you're basically staring at a landscape now. This lesson is the one where you decide what actually goes where on the page, and I have to be honest with you up front: I'm not the person with a system for this.
I don't know the rule of thirds in any way I could explain to you and have it hold up. I've heard of it. I could not draw you a diagram right now that wouldn't be a lie. What I actually do is put the horizon somewhere that isn't dead center, put my biggest shape somewhere that isn't dead center either, and then squint at it for a second and go, yeah, that's fine, or no, that's not fine, and I honestly couldn't tell you the rule I'm applying. I just know it when I see it.
So this lesson isn't going to be "the theory of composition." It's going to be me telling you what I actually do, which is less impressive but more honest.
The stuff I actually pay attention to
One thing should be the main thing. Before you touch a brush, look at your reference photo and pick one thing that's the point of the painting. The mountain. The tree. The one weird cloud. Everything else is there to make that thing look good, not to compete with it.
Don't split the page in half. Horizon line dead center is the most common beginner move and it makes a painting feel stuck, like it's not sure if it's about the sky or the ground. Push it up or push it down. High horizon if the ground's the interesting part, low horizon if the sky's doing something.
Big shapes first, then worry about the small ones. I look at a reference and mentally sort it into three or four big chunks of value — sky, far mountain, middle ground, foreground — before I even think about a single tree or rock. If the big chunks feel balanced, the details basically take care of themselves.
Odd numbers of things. Two trees look like a pair you're supposed to notice. Three trees look like a forest that happens to have three visible trees. I couldn't explain why that's true, it just is, your mileage may vary.
That's genuinely the whole system. It's a feel thing for me, not a formula thing, and I'd rather tell you that straight than hand you some rule I don't actually use myself.
Doing it at home
Grab your reference photo again, the one you've been working from the last couple lessons. Before you paint anything, take a pencil and do a fast, ugly thumbnail sketch — like two inches, thirty seconds, just big shapes, no detail. Ask yourself: where's the horizon, what's the main thing, does anything feel dead center that shouldn't. Adjust the thumbnail, not the real painting, because fixing a two-inch pencil sketch costs you nothing and fixing a painting costs you a wash.
Then transfer that same rough placement to your good paper, lightly, in pencil. Not a full drawing. Just enough guide marks that you know where the horizon goes and where your main shape sits.
One caution here: don't press hard with the pencil. Watercolor paper has tooth to it and a heavy pencil line will dent the surface, and that dent shows up under a wash like a little scar. Light hand. You can always darken a line, you can't un-dent paper.
Leonardo and the big kid brush
I'll tell you about something that changed how I think about this. A while back Leonardo and I painted side by side at the kitchen table, him with what he calls the "big kid" brush, which is just a slightly bigger round than his usual one. He was four. He had zero plan for where anything went. He just started painting a tree wherever his hand landed and then a sun wherever there was space left and it all somehow worked, loose and confident, nothing precious about it.
Mine, sitting right next to his, was careful and kind of stiff. I'd clearly been thinking too hard about where things "should" go. His was better. Not technically — mine had better color control, obviously — but his had a looseness to the placement that mine didn't, because he wasn't scared of getting it wrong.
I've genuinely tried to paint more like that since. Not literally with no plan, but with less fear about the plan. Do your thumbnail, pick your main thing, then let your hand move a little looser than you think you should.
Opinion time, since we're here
I'll say the thing I probably shouldn't say to a class full of people trying to learn rules: finishing isn't the point. If your thumbnail composition is a little off, or your horizon ends up more centered than you wanted, that painting still taught you something and it's fine to let it be what it is. You don't owe every painting a perfect outcome. Some of them are just practice for the placement decision, and that's a real use of a piece of paper, not a wasted one.
Before next time
Do two or three fast thumbnail sketches from photos on your phone, just horizon line and one main shape each, no painting. Get used to deciding before you get used to fixing.