Better Art Composition with ChatGPT

Struggling to create balanced, eye-catching compositions in your art? In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use ChatGPT to analyze and improve your compositions — whether you’re working from a sketch, reference photo, or your imagination.

This is the second lesson in our ChatGPT for Artists series, and in it we’ll explore how this powerful AI tool can become your personal composition coach, helping you refine your thumbnails, boost your focal points, and design more engaging artworks.

As artists, we often work alone — which can make it hard to judge whether our composition is actually working. ChatGPT offers a second set of eyes (well, digital ones!) that can:

• Evaluate your sketches or photo references
• Suggest classic compositional fixes (rule of thirds, balance, focal points)
• Generate thumbnails with improved layout
• Help you brainstorm creative variations from a single source image

All of this can be done quickly, making it a fantastic tool for speeding up your creative process.

If you’re unsure where to begin, you can ask ChatGPT something like:

​

You’ll get a helpful summary including:

• Rule of thirds

• Leading lines

• Focal points

• Visual weight

• Contrast and balance

This is a great way to refresh your memory or learn the fundamentals if you’re just getting started.

I have already done that for you and created a handy Composition Cheat Sheet for you to download:

You can also have full length discussions with ChatGPT about composition. Ask it any questions you have or ask it to explain a specific rule in more detail.

Tip : ChatGPT is very clever and can sometimes reply on an overly advanced level. If it gives you an answer that is too complicated, just ask it to break the answer down into simpler steps and use examples along the way.

You can upload your rough sketch or thumbnail and ask:

With its vision capabilities, ChatGPT can analyze your artwork and suggest improvements like:

• Adjusting object placement for better flow
• Enhancing focal points
• Fixing awkward spacing or symmetry
• Using overlap and lighting for depth

You’ll be amazed at how much valuable feedback it provides — often things we overlook!

Once you have feedback, you can ask ChatGPT to generate a revised version of your thumbnail using its suggestions. This makes it easy to visualize the improvements and choose which elements to apply in your final piece.

Pro Tip: Be sure to specify the aspect ratio you want (e.g. square, portrait, landscape) to get usable results.

In the two images above you can see what I uploaded vs the updated sketch ChatGPT created after implementing it’s suggestions.

This isn’t just for sketches—you can use ChatGPT with photos, too. For example, upload a still life photo and ask it questions like:

-What’s the focal point in this image?

-How can I change the composition to make it stronger?

-Do you think the apple is at the correct place for a pleasing composition?

ChatGPT will then make suggestions based on it’s knowledge.

I did this with the image below:

It told me the apple was the focal point. I however wanted the sttrawberries to be the focal point.

ChatGPT made some fabulous suggestions on how to achieve this like:

• making the apple smaller
• improving the lighting on the strawberries
• moving the apple backwards

I then asked it to show me what that could look like and it generated this image:

Next, I commented that the image had too much red in it. It must please give me some suggestions on how to add more contrast and colour into the scene.

ChatGPT suggested several fabulous ideas. Based off these I decided that the large front strawberry should be replaced with a green pear.

To show ChatGPT what I wanted, I used my drawing app to draw in a basic pear shape onto the image and uploaded my request. The uploaded image looked like this:

ChatGPT then generated this updated image for me:

Pretty amazing right? We now have our own unique scene, which looks similar in composition to the original photo, but it looks much nicer and is way more appealing.

Want to create multiple paintings from one reference? Upload a photo (like I did with the bird above) and ask for different compositional takes.

Working with ChatGPT I was able to generate these variations on the composition while still maintaining the essence of the scene and the original colours:

Just like that I now have four differently composed images which can each be used to paint a different artwork.

You can of course change the scene entirely – I will show you how to do this later in the series!

Using ChatGPT as a composition assistant opens up a world of possibilities. Whether you’re sketching thumbnails, analyzing a photo reference, or looking for creative variations, ChatGPT can give you actionable, personalized suggestions to enhance your art, and even show you the changes!

Are you using ChatGPT yet?