• Special message: Our online workshop Controlling DEGREES of Emphasis will be held on March 22! This is an excellent opportunity for learning how to call attention to areas of importance in your paintings and to learn
how to do the kind of thing I do in this Tip. Are you aware that the one thing that can get in the way of having a clear center of interest is the subject itself? Even though anything that gets your attention is a good subject for a painting, how you look at it will determine how you see it, and how you see it will determine how you paint it. Rather than keeping our attention on what it is, we can learn to see everything in the scene as potential. We can ask ourselves what really calls us to it--is it the color, the value of the colors, the
movement... And we can learn out to select what we want to emphasize, then de-emphasize other things to call attention to our selection. This scene of fall leaves got my attention because of the brilliance of the red orange and yellow orange colors, but when I looked more closely, I realized that within this section I am seeing more dark, earthy colors than brilliant ones. I
wanted to emphasize the brilliance. On the computer, I experimented with ways I could do that by de-emphasizing to various degrees. - I de-emphasized the chaotic energy by deleting most of those frontal twigs
- I further de-emphasized that energy by removing some of the sky holes. Sky holes can be wonderful, but too many can make our paintings chaotic.
- For even more de-emphasis, I blurred some edges and all the sky holes.
- To further emphasize the brilliance, I added more of the darker, duller passages and deleted some of the more brilliant ones.
- And for visual clarity, I refined the lights overlapping the darker areas by adjusting the locations of some of the more brilliant colors in a triangular visual path.
- The last thing I did was add a few really thin, closely contrasting twigs to give back a bit of energy without adding
chaos.
I have emphasized what caught my attention by de-emphasizing in various degrees the parts around it. Now the scene has more clarity and can be used as a reference for a painting if I choose.
ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE MIRACLES THE COMPOSING PRINCIPLES CAN GIVE US! Enjoy a delightful weekend! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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