Composition isn't a worksheet rule — it's how landscape painters decide what a place feels like. This is the rung where you stop obeying the rules and start using them, which is exactly what this unit's own landscape work will ask of you.
Three Painters, Three Choices
Look at John Constable, the great English painter of fields and skies. He usually settles his horizon low-ish so big weathery clouds fill the top of the canvas, then stacks careful foreground, middle ground and background — a cart here, a church tower far off — so you feel the whole damp depth of the countryside. His pictures feel settled, lived-in, because the depth is doing the quiet work.
J.M.W. Turner goes the other way. He drops the horizon right down and hands almost the entire picture to a vast, dramatic sky of light and storm. The land becomes a thin anchoring strip; the weather is the subject. That's a low horizon used on purpose, for awe.
And closer to home, the Australian painter Arthur Streeton composed wide, sun-bleached views of the bush and the harbour — high, open horizons, golden light, a strong focal point like a winding road or a distant town pulling your eye across the heat. He was painting this light, the one out our window, and you can read every composition choice we've covered straight off his canvases.
Now Compose Your Own
The builder below is yours to play with. Add a tree, a hill, a hut, a figure; stack them through the foreground, middle ground and background; lift or drop the horizon; and slide the focal point onto the thing your picture is about. As you go, it reads back what you've made — "a low horizon, real depth across all three bands, a clear focal point on a third-line" — so you can hear your composition described the way a painter would describe it, and adjust until it says what you meant.
Why This Is the Real Finish Line
Discovering that the horizon sets the mood was the "aha". Learning to stack depth and pick a hero made it solid. Dodging the empty, cluttered and split traps made it reliable. Composing a whole scene on purpose — and being able to say why it works — that's mastery, and it's exactly what the rest of this unit, right through to capturing place in your own materials and marks, is going to ask of you.