ANNOUNCEMENT:

How we place our images can make or break our compositions. Our May workshop can help you place your images for the strongest compositions every time.  Check it out HERE!  

I hope you enjoy this refurbished post from 2019.

Do you want your paintings to get your viewers' attention? I mean really get their attention. Make them look where you want them to look? Try using a strategy of directional movement.  

Directional movement is any visual tool that directs the viewer's attention either by how images are placed and/or emphasized. It could be lines that converge, it could be the placement of images, it could be the direction in which images are turned or leaning, it could be value contrasts or simultaneous contrast. Whatever strategy points the viewer to follow a visual path in a painting is directional movement. 

THREE EXAMPLES

Andrew Wyeth directs where your eyes go with placement in "Christina's World". He grabs you with the way he's placed Christina and makes you look at her house by the way she looks towards it. Then brings you back to her with aligning a barn directly over her head.  

He has all three images emphasized with the tools of isolating and strong value contrast.

Richard Schmid does it with one-point perspective, a strategy that works every time to command the viewer's attention. Wherever the visual lines converge will pull our eyes towards to area.

In A Hopeless Dawn, 19th century British painter Frank Bramley uses the direction in which images are turned to pull us from the woman to the girl, towards the table, then out the window.

TRY THIS:

Choose a scene, then rather than copy it as you see it, work out some rough sketches where you consciously edit placement or angles or even contrasts of the images to guide the viewers exactly where you want them to go when they first look at your work.

Once you realize you have that freedom, never again will you want to settle for just what nature gives you.

Light and Shadow: The one thing that lets our eyes see.
Visual Movement: What our eyes do when images are visible.
Seeing Beyond the Image: The possibilities beyond just describing what our eyes see.
Freeing the Artist Within (Curiosity): Finding our individual interpretation to what our eyes are seeing. 
Composing:  Finding ways to put together all that we discover.
Drawing:  Searching the potential of images.
The Craft:  Continually forging our skills to visually communicate what we continue to discover with our eyes, mind and soul.

And the eighth:

The Art:  The results when all the above are working together.