How to Create a Focal Point in a Painting

The focal point is the place in a painting the eye goes to first and keeps coming back to. You make one by putting your strongest contrast there, of value, edge, color or detail, and keeping everything else a step quieter.

What pulls the eye

• Value contrast. Your lightest light against your darkest dark. Harold Speed pointed to Turner's Ulysses deriding Polyphemus (National Gallery, London), where the greatest dark and the greatest light meet in one place: dark rocks and the prows of ships against the rising sun.
• Hard edges and detail. In a 2010 eye-tracking study, Steve DiPaola, Caitlin Riebe and James Enns showed viewers portraits rendered by computer in the style of Rembrandt's late portraits, with one eye in finer detail than the other. Viewers' eyes reached the detailed eye more than 170 milliseconds sooner than the plainer one, and moved from the plainer eye to the detailed one more often than the other way round. Keep the finest detail and the sharpest edges for the focal point. See hard and soft edges.
• Intense color, and anything else that's the odd one out. A saturated color among grays, one warm note in a cool picture, the only vertical among horizontals, a small shape among big ones. Laurent Itti, Christof Koch and Ernst Niebur built a computer model of visual attention that reproduces how people search: an item that differed from everything around it in color, brightness, orientation or size was always the first place it looked, however many other items there were.
• People, and faces above all. In a 2012 eye-tracking study of 40 paintings, Davide Massaro and colleagues found that in paintings of people, the face was the first area where viewers' gaze gathered in 61% of cases. In those paintings the subject mattered more than visual features such as color; in landscapes, those features had more effect on where people looked. A figure will compete with whatever else you make the focal point, so put it there or leave it out.
• Lines leading in. Speed wrote that lines direct attention, "the eye instinctively running with them". A road, a river, the edge of a shadow or a pointing arm can carry the eye to the focal point. Lines can also carry it out, and Speed warned that the corners of the frame catch the eye. His fix was to fill them with a dark mass, or with lines that swing the eye past them toward the center.

Where to put it

Off center, unless you want a still, symmetrical picture, and away from the edges and corners, where it drags the eye out of the frame. The rule of thirds and the golden section are two ways of finding a place in between: see rule of thirds and golden section. The drawing grid maker can draw both over your photo, so you can see where the focal point falls before you crop.

One main focal point

Two equally strong centers split attention, and the eye bounces between them. Arthur Wesley Dow called the cure subordination: relate every part of a picture to "a single dominating element which determines the character of the whole". He applied it to masses of dark and light and to color as well as to line.

Secondary points of interest are fine as long as each has less pull than the main one. If the focal point has the hardest edge, the strongest contrast and the most intense color, a second area might have a softer edge and middle contrast, and a third only a change of color.

Check it

• Look from across the room, or at a photo of the painting on your phone, and notice where your eye lands first. If it isn't the focal point, find what's stronger, such as a stray highlight, a hard edge in a corner or a spot of bright color, and turn that down before you turn the focal point up.
• Make a value study. If the strongest value contrast is somewhere else, the eye will go there too. In the notan and value study maker, tap the lightest value, then the darkest, to see where each falls.
• Question the photo. A reference photo's focal point may be the camera's: whatever was in focus, a bright sky, a sign in the background. Decide whether it's yours before you paint it.

The Paintsight app's focal point view shows where the eye goes first in a reference photo, so you can see whether that's where you want it before you start.

Sources

• Harold Speed, The Practice and Science of Drawing, 1913, chapter XII, "Rhythm: Unity of Line", on lines and corners, and chapter XIV, "Rhythm: Unity of Mass", on Turner. Project Gutenberg.
• The National Gallery, London, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, 1829.
• Steve DiPaola, Caitlin Riebe and James T. Enns, "Rembrandt's Textural Agency: A Shared Perspective in Visual Art and Science", Leonardo 43, no. 2 (2010): 145–151.
• Laurent Itti, Christof Koch and Ernst Niebur, "A Model of Saliency-Based Visual Attention for Rapid Scene Analysis", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 20, no. 11 (1998): 1254–1259.
• Davide Massaro and others, "When Art Moves the Eyes: A Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Study", PLoS ONE 7, no. 5 (2012): e37285.
• Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition, ninth edition, 1914 (first published 1899), chapter III, "Ways of Creating Harmony", on subordination. Project Gutenberg.