Center of Interest
The art of composition or design is one of the more difficult skills for us to acquire in
learning how to make convincing, and engaging pictures. There are many parts to learning
to compose - to begin lets embrace the idea of a center of interest.. The final piece should be
one unit resulting from an arrangement of parts. Those parts are put into harmony or
balance with one another around a central idea - our big picture. A good place to start with
composition is a center of interest or a place in your painting that in general has more
interest and used to give the audience more description and understanding than other parts.
We relate other areas to the center of interest and achieve a harmony of parts in this way. The
center of interest is an important idea in visual communication and in establishing our goal
in creating the Big Picture
Center of interest:
Lets put this idea to the test. Where is the
area of interest in this painting. It was my
intention to make it in the area of the Large
boat and it’s reflection. To that effect I have
used several means to identify the center of
interest clearly. one is contrast, 2 is hard edges
3 is the convergence of lines at the boats, the
two boats are connected as one shape and so
too their reflections
Photographers use the same principles that painters use as we are both communicating
through the visual language. Painters perhaps have the means to manipulate them more and
so practice with these ideas and make them tools that serve you when composing
My tonal study above drove home the importance of using tonal contrast and hard edges
to draw the eye to the 2 boats - subsequently a more quiet and softer background was
contrived to represent the background which in the photograph was much too busy. That is an
important lesson in this piece - to reduce the background to a simple series of shapes or a
pattern is an important ability we cultivate in the painters art.