SUMMING UP

In his book Composing your Paintings, Bernard Dunstan says: ‘It is dangerous, although tempting, to isolate the different aspects of painting from one another … everything in a picture that looks as if it could be taken out and examined as a subject by itself turns out to be dependant upon, and modified by, many other factors’. So although I have offered you a few basic ideas here about the focal point in relation to the composition of a picture, please be aware that it is only a small, if important, part of the whole painting.

TWO GARDEN CHAIRS

pastel on paper, 51 ? 61 cm (20 ? 24 in)

It is obvious that the foreground chair is the focal point of the picture. The shadows on the ground lead us in from the bottom edge of the rectangle to the chair, and the light tones of the chair contrast strongly with the dark surroundings. The second chair, repeating the angles of the first, provides an effective pictorial echo.

3

CREATING DEPTH

I have difficulty in creating a sense of depth in my paintings. How can I achieve the effect of depth so that they appear more realistic?

Answered by: John Mitchell

There are several ways in which you can suggest depth: perspective, tone, overlapping, and weight of texture or line. In practice any picture will use a combination of these.

Perspective is probably the most obvious way to suggest depth. Unfortunately, it can become confusing with expressions like ‘vanishing points’ and ‘height lines’. So let us try to keep it simple.

These drawings demonstrate easy approaches to perspective. Practise by drawing matchboxes seen from different angles and follow this up in thumbnail sketches like these. Perspective is the main method of getting depth into paintings.

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