Composition revisited!
I remember last year I gave sort of an introduction to using composition to guiding a viewer around an image. Justin said that there was technology for studying what the viewer really does look at, and that it would be interesting to see if that matched up with the centuries-old compositional practices.
Well, someone did that! :)
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2009/09/eye-tracking-and-composition-part-1.html
To skip to the "preliminary conclusions", here they are:
1. The eye does not flow in smooth curves or circles, nor does it follow contours. It leaps from one point of interest to another. Curving lines or other devices may be "felt" in some way peripherally, but the eye doesn't move along them.
2. Placing an element on a golden section grid line doesn’t automatically attract attention. If an attention-getting element such as a face is placed in the scene, it will gather attention wherever you place it.
3. Two people don’t scan the same picture along the same route. But they do behave according to an overall strategy that alternates between establishing context and studying detail.
4. The viewer is not a passive player continuously controlled by a composition. Each person confronts an image actively, driven by a combination of conscious and unconscious impulses, which are influenced, but not determined, by the design of the picture.
5. The unconscious impulses seem to include the establishment of hierarchies of interest based on normal expectations or schema of a scene. For example, highly contrasting patterns of foliage or branches will not directly draw the gaze unless they are perceived as anomalous in the peripheral vision.
5. As pictorial designers we shouldn’t think in abstract terms alone. Abstract design elements do play a role in influencing where viewers look in a picture, but in pictures that include people or animals or a suggestion of a story, the human and narrative elements are what direct our exploration of a picture.
As Dr. Edwards succinctly puts it, “abstract design gets trumped by human stories.” The job of the artist, then, in composing pictures about people is to use abstract tools to reinforce the viewer’s natural desire to seek out a face and a story.
Well, someone did that! :)
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2009/09/eye-tracking-and-composition-part-1.html
To skip to the "preliminary conclusions", here they are:
1. The eye does not flow in smooth curves or circles, nor does it follow contours. It leaps from one point of interest to another. Curving lines or other devices may be "felt" in some way peripherally, but the eye doesn't move along them.
2. Placing an element on a golden section grid line doesn’t automatically attract attention. If an attention-getting element such as a face is placed in the scene, it will gather attention wherever you place it.
3. Two people don’t scan the same picture along the same route. But they do behave according to an overall strategy that alternates between establishing context and studying detail.
4. The viewer is not a passive player continuously controlled by a composition. Each person confronts an image actively, driven by a combination of conscious and unconscious impulses, which are influenced, but not determined, by the design of the picture.
5. The unconscious impulses seem to include the establishment of hierarchies of interest based on normal expectations or schema of a scene. For example, highly contrasting patterns of foliage or branches will not directly draw the gaze unless they are perceived as anomalous in the peripheral vision.
5. As pictorial designers we shouldn’t think in abstract terms alone. Abstract design elements do play a role in influencing where viewers look in a picture, but in pictures that include people or animals or a suggestion of a story, the human and narrative elements are what direct our exploration of a picture.
As Dr. Edwards succinctly puts it, “abstract design gets trumped by human stories.” The job of the artist, then, in composing pictures about people is to use abstract tools to reinforce the viewer’s natural desire to seek out a face and a story.
Comments
A lot of research done on this has been available, and taught, in 'academic' art education for many years. (very interesting work also done in the same line on the eyes movement in writing and in comics) It highlights one of the dangers of teaching formulaic 'rules' as art strategies without a deeper investigation.
Something that needs to be taken into consideration when approaching visual literacy - which these rules of composition, colour etc fall under - is that it is exactly that: literacy. There is nothing natural about it: it is cultural training to allow the production and consumption (the writing and reading) of visual texts. The eye 'moves' no more naturally or consistently over a written page than it does over a painting. Instead, producing meaning from any text, written or visual, is about how we are culturally taught to interpret the data - in the case of writing, in straight lines with a beginning and an end: your eye jumps and skips, and your mind assembles it correctly. In the same way, the impact of colour, texture and contrast are learnt behaviours.
The human face, and to a lesser extent the figure, overriding these learnt literacies has been used consistently in the production of art well pre-dating the renaissance (which is where these 'rules' where established), through the renaissance and to the current day. It is theorised primarily as a form of (miss)identification with routes in developmental psychology.
It is a big part of what is studied in the arts. While you don't 'need' to have studied and understood this to be able to produce amazing art, it does help to control what you are doing.