Developing room composition skills does not happen overnight. You do not magically become good at understanding proportions, balance, space, and focus. Instead, you need to engage in a series of small exercises to improve your spatial reasoning skills. A lot of aspiring designers will wait until they have a long free afternoon to practice designing spaces, but they will end up not doing much of anything because the task seems too daunting. A 15-minute exercise can be much more effective. In 15 minutes, you can improve your visual acumen if you have a specific goal in mind. Your goal should not be to create a finished design. Instead, your goal should be to refine one aspect of your spatial awareness. In this article, I will show you how to practice room composition in 15 minutes.
Pick a room that is easy to design, such as a foyer or a reading nook or a small living room. In the first two to three minutes, study the reference photo. As you look at the reference photo, try to identify the most prominent compositional element in the room. Maybe the room is symmetrical. Maybe it has a focal point that is off center. Maybe the room is defined by strong horizontals. Maybe the room is defined by a contrast between full and empty spaces. After you identify the most prominent compositional element, close the reference photo and try to draw the room from memory using the simplest shapes possible. Draw furniture as rectangles and walls as large planes. This will help you to focus on the spatial aspects of the room and not get caught up in the details. Getting caught up in the details is a big part of why a lot of designers struggle to develop their composition skills.
When a room looks bad, the temptation is to add another piece of furniture, another lamp, another throw, another pillow, or another knick-knack. Adding more often makes the room look worse because the room now has too much stuff, and the items do not relate to one another in a meaningful way. When this happens, instead of adding another item, try to subtract one. Ask yourself if there is a focal point in the room and if the items in the room support the focal point. If they do not, try to remove them. Sometimes, the best thing that you can do for a room is to create some negative space. Negative space is not bad. Negative space is what makes a room have cadence and authority.
For the bulk of the exercise, focus on fixing one aspect of the room. If the room looks two-dimensional, work on creating depth. Separate the foreground plane from the middle ground plane from the background plane. If the room looks unbalanced, work on adjusting the visual mass so that one side of the room is not heavier than the other for no reason. If the room looks disorganized, work on strengthening the axis. Focus on one thing and try to fix one thing. This is how you improve. Do not try to finish ten rushed sketches that all repeat the same weak habits. Instead, try to take one room and improve one thing about it. This will help you to understand how small changes affect the whole room. Understanding how small changes affect the whole room is one of the most important parts of developing your composition skills.
In the last couple of minutes of the exercise, compare your original sketch to your revised sketch. Try to identify how the feeling of the room changed. Did the room feel more relaxing? More focused? More grounded? More purposeful? Try to write a sentence or two about what made the difference. Maybe the designer moved the sofa away from the window. Maybe the designer changed the emphasis of the lighting. Maybe the designer stopped letting the bookshelves compete with the view. Writing about what made the difference will help you to remember the rule, so you can apply it to the next room you design. Otherwise, you will be starting from scratch again.
