Reference sheet commission - Timelapse + composition notes

Timelapse of this reference sheet I finished recently for Bratblush! You can see me struggle a bit with the composition but I guess this only creates a perfect basis for the few tips for planning out a composition that also helped me to figure out the final placement of things here. I have this tendency to overthink and the usual way out of it is to focus on the basics. 😅

First, here's the completed reference sheet and below it some scribbles to visualize my approach to the composition!

The arrows represent the way I'm trying to guide the viewer's eye through the piece, prioritizing the ones in red which start out at the front view full body, more specifically the character's face. I focus on that because it's usually what gives the best overall idea of the character - from there I move to the details I view as the second important, and so on. In this one the eye focuses on the main full body views because of the scale, as our mind tends to view larger images/text as more important.

Since I specialize in furry art, the characters I draw usually have a tail that I can use to guide the eye as is seen here. Other things to use for this purpose can be strands of hair, clothing and of course different poses!

When the reference sheet is has more detail, I usually divide the composition into the "main" and "secondary" parts to avoid overwhelm even when I'm aiming for a more maximalist look than what is seen here. I do this because I want even more detailed refs to be easily approachable when in use, i.e. an artist who's going to draw the character sees it for the first time and wants to have a clear idea of the subject at first glance. I try to make it so that the main parts give a general idea of things like the looks (obviously), personality and maybe style, and I also fit the basic information such as color chart somewhere close.

The parts marked with blue are usually something that add to the red parts, i.e. give more information of specific details.

This is not the only way to build a composition but something that helped me with this piece in particular! I would like to cover a centre composition in the future as well, and if anyone's interested I could post more design notes like this of things I make, not just reference sheets! 👀 Writing this all is such a great way for me to learn too.