7. The Principles of Composition 5: Focus & Emphasis
Emphasis is about choosing what's most important in your work, that you want viewers to appreciate most. Every artwork needs one or more areas of emphasis, called focal points - specific places in an artwork that pull your eye towards them because they're more exciting, more meaningful. Almost every artwork has a focal point somewhere, and most have several. In figurative art, faces are almost always focal points. Hands are common points as well. We look for faces and hands to figure out what characters are doing, thinking, and feeling. Here's an example posted by illustrator James Gurney (You can see his post here.).
On the left, we have his original illustration. On the right you can see a heat map, which shows you where people tend to look the longest. This was developed with the help of a special program; James had several people look at the painting, and a computer studied their eyes to see where they looked the longest. The red and orange spots are the focal points.
But, abstract pictures have focal points too, see if you can find the point of emphasis in this one:
Without focal points, there's nothing to look at - the picture feels empty.
An artwork may have more than one focal point, although juggling more than three in a picture can be difficult - add too many focal points, and you end up with none, as any class photo will attest:
Also note, the natural desire of the viewer to understand a piece can outweigh certain pictorial effects:
Also, beware that focal points can compete with each other:
What's the main focus of this picture? The detailed, high-contrast town, or the poor girl below, wondering why you don't look at her? Oops...
Artists emphasize focal points by designing the rest of the composition to lead our eyes to them - an effect referred to as movement. You can see how it works in another view of James Gurney's artwork - the digital lines represent how one person's eyes traveled along his painting:
That's movement, and a good composition should suggest a line of travel or two for your eyes to travel around the image. I once heard an art teacher confuse movement with motion lines, that cartoonists often use:
It's not the same thing. It's not about objects in motion. I'll explain with these principles:
1. The center of the picture is also the natural center of interest. It's where people typically expect to find something important.
2. Square, rectangular, & circular frames all lead our attention to the center of the picture. That's about 99% of all frames, but there are shaped canvases that can draw our attention elsewhere (see my lesson on choosing canvas shapes).
3. Smaller circles and squares inside a picture can focus attention to what's inside them, like a frame-within-a-frame. Think of halos.
Alphonse Mucha often used halos to frame his subjects:
Note, a person's head is already round, so you can get a halo effect just with the right lighting - particularly back lighting:
It doesn't have to be obvious, either. You can break up a halo and it still works, or simply put white around a focal point - something James Gurney calls "flagging". The higher contrast creates higher interest in that one shape, or person:
Here's another example:
4. Artists often worry about people getting stuck in the center, so they may put the focal point off-center. That way people feel free to look around the picture, at all the details.
Notice how your eye follows the little lines of water that play along the glass pane. You don't look at them nearly as much when the whole composition is square, with the face in the center:
Many artists and photographers put focal points 1/3 from the edges of the image:
Example given by John Harris, 2014
This "rule of thirds" has become something of an industry standard, although it's worth noting, it's a rule many great masters have broken repeatedly. Don't think you always have to place your focal point/s in one of these four spots.
5. Faces in figurative art are often focal points because we look to an expression to help explain the story - whatever's happening in the piece. This desire can outweigh any other compositional devices.
6. As shapes get smaller, higher up, and lighter, they seem to be farther away. Shapes that are lower, bigger, and brighter seem closer to us. When objects are closer to us, they seem more important.
7. When one shape overlaps another, the one in front is usually more important:
Note how the woman's face and clothing are warm red colors. Most artists will tell you that red is the strongest, most striking color, and is thus best for the foreground. It works, but it's not your only option. Painter Sir Joshua Reynolds once suggested that blue should never be used in the foreground. When his rival, Thomas Gainsborough, heard that, he went out and painted this:
Note how striking the boy' pose and costume are despite being blue, which goes to show, in composition, rules are made to be broken.
Overlapping is important in realism because it looks more natural, especially in groups of figures:
Here's an interesting exception to the rule on overlapping, a subject - a person - who's been overlapped by the staircase:
The stairs may dominate your field of view, but the woman still dominates your interest, because people are always more interesting and therefore important. This shows how context overrides little visual tricks. But, it doesn't negate the huge stairs, they work together to create a specific feeling. The main character of this story appears to be walking away, soon to be out of sight, and there's nothing you can do about it. This is a story about leaving, parting. The large empty staircase is about to be all you have left.
If both shapes are a similar color, they join into a single visual unit. Note how the man in black melds into the black interior behind him. It's a bit like his head and hands are floating in a black void:
8. A simple way to make a focal point is to create an area of high contrast in your work. It can be a contrast in detail, realism, color, value, etc. People notice differences immediately.
De Profundis, by Heather HortonThis painting emphasizes the swimmer as a focal point by contrasting color, value, and the size of brushstrokes. Note, all these contrasting effects are cumulative - they all work together:
9. Photographers use a large aperture (small F stop) for a very shallow depth of field, so that only what they want you to see will be in focus:
This flower is a classic example for photography, leaving the background a blur. Painters often create the same effect:
Chadding on Mount's Bay, by Stanhope Forbes, 1902
10. Another way to make a clear focal point is to remove unnecessary details and elements. Artist Howard Pyle said, "They will never shoot you for what you leave out of a picture." In this next example, there's a lot going on, but only the face is painted with precision. Everything else is loosely indicated - with just enough detail to describe what it is, but no more, because it's the face that matters most:
11. Another technique is what James Gurney calls "spokewheeling" like the spokes in a wheel that all point to the center.
In a picture, you can do the same thing with leading lines radiating out from a focal point. Remember what I said about some lines being invisible but still important? These two examples are by James Gurney:
Note, the effect doesn't always look like a wheel - it's not supposed to. The point of this is to force your eyes toward a focal point, not to hide an actual wheel shape. Think of it as a bunch of hidden little fingers all pointing where you're supposed to look Here's another example:
Here's a portrait that uses a parasol as both a halo and a spoke wheel to lead yours eyes into her face:
12. When you draw people, a great way to lead people's eyes is with the direction of each person's head. Viewers naturally look at faces first, and whatever your figures are looking at, we want to look at too. So, the turn and tilt of a head is very important. See how the man standing on the right looks down at the seated figure? It leads you to look at him too. This picture also uses spoke-wheel lines. Can you see them?
Who Hired You? by Dean Cornwell, 1924
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