There’s a lot of people in this scene, but you know exactly where to look at. How?

They may look very different, but this painting shares the same concept:

Large simple areas of rest make your eyes want something complicated. Areas that are complicated make your eyes want to rest on something simple. By interleaving them together, we push and pull the eyes to follow invisible lines around the picture. The goal of the artist is to carefully craft the place where the gaze ends up.

Regardless of whether we’re drawing a crowd scene of philosophers or a single portrait, we use areas of rest and areas of complexity to drive the attention of the picture to the important parts. Usually a picture has only one, this is called the “focal point.” You can think of it as the central argument.

As a child, I owned the puzzle set for School of Athens. I repeatedly took it apart and put it back together. Even though I didn’t understand at the time what artistic principle I was looking at, I noticed that some pieces were always easier to locate than others. For example, Plato and Aristotle (in class, I incorrectly identified Aristotle as Socrates, sorry!) sit on the vanishing point, as well as the point of highest contrast for the painting, so they were always easy to place. In comparison, the ceiling was always very hard to assemble. The center is the vanishing point, the focal point, and the point of highest contrast and saturation. The artist really wanted you to understand his central argument.

When you have these two focal points, they compete for priority. Notice the jewelry and the face here, competing for your attention. This is caused by the visual complexity in the jewelry

If you continue ramping up the visual complexity of the jewelry, at some point, the subject of the painting will change, back to one focal point, on the hairpin. (Perhaps you could use this to sell a fancy hairpin)

It’s all about the relative hierarchy of the objects in the scene.In the end, it depends on the kind of story that you want to tell.

Compared the picture below to the two pictures above. Curiously, it is organized in terms of rest areas and complex areas: it pushes and pulls our eyes, but since there’s no focal point, it’s hard to tell what is going on at a glance. There’s no location where our gaze rests.

Why is this picture so strangely organized? It’s function is a clue to its presentation. This painting is a secular triptych. Meaning, it’s a piece of furniture, a medieval home entertainment system of sorts. It doesn’t rely on first read impressions: it has a lot of little details that you can only see when you step close to it, unlike Raphael’s painting, which is all the way up on a ceiling, or the niji generation, which is meant to hit you at a glance.

Raphael’s organization methods have remained timeless. In contrast, you rarely see paintings organized like Hieronymus Bosch’s these days: the general modern principle is that the first read must convey a strong focal point: people simply don’t have the time for a second read.

I’ve always thought this picture was funny, because it is a list of all the things you ought not do, but listed in extreme detail: (“you definitely should not stick a bouquet of flowers into somebody’s butt, certainly not like the way I have demonstrated here.”) I’m sure whichever medieval family owned this piece had some amusement over this.

When it comes down to it, there are many possible ways to organize a painting. After all, tastes change with time and function. We’ll teach many of these in this course, but today, we’ll focus on a single one. Remember, our job is to create a focal point, so we can safely convey our idea from our minds to the minds of our audience.

This first visual organization concept we will explore is value, which is to say, organization by brightness.

To establish a value structure, we will sort the brightness into our picture into 2 buckets, either light or dark. The very important line which separates dark into light is called the terminator line.

Rendered light - emotional, mysterious scenes

You can also do it the other way around:

Rendered shadow - comforting, soft moments

Unusual: anime girls with rendered light

Actually, when you can sculpt a perfect terminator line, you don’t need to render very much.

Rimlight is this form of organization, taken to the extreme.

The elegance of rimlight

The majesty of rimlight

The power of rim light!

niji loves rim light

(I’m sorry, niji users)

Rimlight is a little bit overdone, I admit, but it is very convenient

Complicated compositions like this rely on adhering to value organization in order to read well. By keeping the terminator line and the light side clean, the artists here can fill the rest of the picture with detail without overwhelming the audience.

It all starts from the division of light and shadow: You can see the entire painting from the terminator line:

The ultimate goal is to draw in a way that doesn’t move from the initial terminator line. Once you organize the hierarchy of a painting, you must not go tearing it back down.

From: illustrator RDJlock

If there’s one study that you take away from this class, let it be this one! It forms the backbone of how we organize information on the canvas.

Remember, drawing is thinking! To convince our audience of a concept, we must first organize it clearly in our own minds!

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