Focus

[John Reidy]

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.

[Allan Rahbek]

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

[Steven Sweeney]

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.

[Steven Sweeney]

Some combination of those last two images, including Allan's deepening of the body shadows on the figure, is probably getting about optimum.

It probably seems to some like we're "having our way" with John's painting, trying to insist on a single course. In fact we're just making some rather gross adjustments to try to illustrate a few ideas about how the focal area can be given its rightful prominence in the overall presentation. As Allan suggested, there are many ways to accomplish this -- but it's useful to do so, by whatever means you choose.