Find your Focal Point(s)
When somebody looks at your landscape painting for the first time, what do you want them to focus on? How to bring their eyes where you want to? Answering these questions is the aim of environment concept artists, but illustrators also need interesting backgrounds to tell their story. Let’s go deeper into possible ways to achieve this...
When you work on environments, it can be good to have knowledge in drawing elements from nature, architecture… you can collect personal references for future compositions to help you find interesting shapes or patterns, but also guides in terms of lighting and colors. Observe the world around you to understand how organically things are combined. Forests, plains, cities, houses, gardens… gaze at everything! Working in the game industry, you can be asked to paint environments for worlds that don’t exist and where nature is different. You can search on the Internet what exists around the world and redesign it to your purpose. With time and experience, you will be able to imagine your own version of reality and make your landscapes more believable. These researches nourish your mind and help you start building a composition.
Painting a character without a background is different from an environment. Indeed, in the latter you must bring the viewer’s eyes to a focal point, which represents the starting point in your visual storytelling. There can be one or several of them depending on your subject matter. There are many possibilities to draw the viewer’s attention toward those points. Here few examples:
You can catch the eye using a different color. Here, the small yellow point in the center contrasts with the water and the sky.
You can guide the viewer by making him follow several lines towards your focal point. These converging lines can be hidden under a sidewalk, a river, clouds…
Placing your focal point in the center catch our eyes automatically. Also it’s a human silhouette that is easily recognizable.
You can highlight the focal point by creating a dark composition with a beam of light. This contrast will catch the viewer’s eyes.
Naturally you can’t use all of them in every situation, sometimes they wouldn’t even match with your needs. In that case, you could prefer using your experience and imagination to find what will work best. When drawing environments, the concept of perspective is important because it creates depth in your painting, but following its rules to the letter could give an artificial look to your work. When you paint a city, you could prefer using a grid or building 3D models, but for a natural landscape it isn’t a necessity. If you have doubts about your composition, don’t forget that you can always flip your canvas or zoom out. Let your creativity and intuition help you on this.