Glad to, John. An advisement, though, that I'm hitting the road for an extended period, through early June, so don't read anything into a nonresponse, or at least a very tardy one.

By the way, since it's now available for viewing, Marvin's PSA prizewinner is a strong case-in-point for focus, and it calls into play the note in the "addendum" above. The piece is detailed and rich throughout, and so his focus is largely a matter of value. Squint at the image and all question about what the painting is "about" dissipates. The remainder of the painting supports that focal area.

Steven your article is very well written, once again. Thanks for the compositional clarity.

I always love reading your articles as you have a knack of portraying your ideals and knowledge that you want to focus on in a way that is very student friendly and not filled with ambiguous words.

You should be making your millions as a arts writer/teacher.

Hope your journeys are sure and safe.

I couldn't help but steal this from a news story from today's fodder:

Niccol

Steve,

Here is the painting I refered to concerning focus. My intention was to create depth and a focus point. I needed the depth to pull off the piece and the composition lent itself to a composition to force the eye to the action of the subject.

Here's the post from the unveiling section.

[I have to preface the following by saying that when I opened your image up this morning on a different monitor using a better browser, the effect was markedly different from what I was looking at when I wrote the following and made the image adjustment. It may well be that in another day, my take on this would be different, but that "other day" will be in mid-June sometime, so I'll just post this for whatever use you may be able to make of it.]

Okay, John, as I wrote elsewhere, this is nicely executed, a thoughtful capturing of another artist at work, in his

Yes, just dropping in for a moment to look with "fresh" eyes, I've gone a little too dark with the "non-focal" areas and, if nothing else, altered the mood of the piece. I'll see if I can't ease up on that and re-post the image, because I do think that the direction is right, it just went too far. It's hard to translate subtlety between differently calibrated monitors.

Meanwhile, anyone with Photoshop or other imaging software could capture this image and experiment with brightening the entire image or parts of it. The "focus" idea is to make the eye go to the focal area through some combination of intense or subdued color, strong or slight contrast, hard or soft edges, little or lots of detail.

All of which is NOT to say that everything outside the focal area will be bland and indistinct and unimportant. It's a matter of the elements in relation to each other, not "the important thing and then all the other stuff."

Steve,

Thanks for your generous response. I am grateful for your thoughts and especially the way you thread them together.

Per the topic of these discussions I am eager to learn the opportunities and the various ways that we as artists can manipulate our art to achieve these goals. I hope that we can all participate and I know that I have learned a lot already and am looking forward to learning more.

Please everyone, jump in.

John,
There are many roads to Rome.
Another method to put the focus on a figure is to darken the shadow areas of the figure and keep the highlights brighter, so that it stands out from the more even values of the background.

I have only darkened the shadows a bit so that you will know the idea.

Allan

Yes, that works, too, punching up the value design within the figure itself. Whatever it takes to distinguish it, and cause the eye's "needle" to swing toward that magnetic pole in the picture.

Not to beat this to death, but I raised the value a little on my earlier version and am curious to see how it will appear on the various monitors I see these things on over the course of the days.