Composing and Drawing Tip of the Week.

January 18, 2014
Greetings!
 
During the act of composing, we're constantly using a combination of visual pulls (levers) and visual stops in order to keep the viewer's eye moving within the painting to keep it in balance or equipoise.  

    Try this:  
  1. With a pencil or pen, draw a dark horizontal line about an inch long.  
  2. Now draw an arrow at one end of it.  Look at it and notice how the arrow pulls your eye towards the direction in which it is pointed.  Your eye moves in that direction, but how does it know where to stop? 
  3. Leaving an empty space of about 1/2 inch from the arrow's point, draw a dark vertical line about an inch long located so that the arrow points towards the center of it.  
  4. Look at that area and notice how your eye stops at the vertical line.
  5. Right in the center of your vertical line, draw a smiley face, look away for a moment, then look back.  
  6. Notice how the smiley face redirects your eye back to the arrow.
Sometimes we need simply to stop the eye and at other times we both halt it  and redirect it back into the painting.  
                                                                                                             Sautee Herefords at Dusk     Oil On Canvas

Look at the two examples above from one of my little oil paintings.  In the image on the left, the eye moves diagonally downward from the top of the frontal cow's rear towards the second cow's head.  There's no other place for the eye to go except off the edge of the painting.

In the photo on the right we see that by adding the third cow to the back and left, the eye stops and because that cow is looking towards the viewer, we are redirected back into the painting.

By inserting a live being looking at the viewer or looking towards other images in the painting, we can both stop the eye and redirect it.

Happy painting, 
Dianne

 

P.S. Another way to stop and redirect is to insert the appearance of a moving object, such as a car or person walking, headed  towards the viewer or towards other images in the painting.   Try any of these methods in a small study and share your results with us on our Facebook page.

P.S.S.  So far 24 of you have joined the Facebook group.   That's a good size to get some action going.   

 

   
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