All right, this is our direction, part two. And we just talked about the problem of getting people to look at your piece and staying there and coming back to it. And how did we do that? And we came up with this idea that you're the conductor, you're orchestrating your piece, like a conductor, in a symphony, only, you're the art director. And you have total control over what you put down on paper. And the idea that it's not so much rendering a bunch of detail, but it's using camerawork and composition, and storytelling to do that work for you to engage the viewer and keep them coming back.

Now, you don't need a bunch of animation actors and movement to do this, and this is a second part of art direction, part two. So we want to create a focal point. So we'll talk about the mechanics of eye movement. This is really important. So in this painting unexpected visitors done in the 18 hundred's, watch what happens here. Back in the 1960s and 70s.

Some scientists were able to come up with some ways to measure eye movement. And look at this. This is what they found when they tracked the eye movement of someone looking at this picture, and you can kind of see their centers have areas of detail where the eye spent most of the time looking, but it's tracing, it's jumping, it's going all over the place. What's happening here. Well, if we go back to the original painting, if you think of it like a photo, a lot of times a photo will just present all the information to us in high clarity from front to back left to right. And our eyes don't really see like that.

They don't really take in information like that, but we tend to think that's how it is. So we just draw the picture. Everything's in detail all over the place, everything's clear. Let's dig into that a little bit more, because there are some mysteries here that we can take advantage of. So let's look at this, how this is what maybe a camera sees, like I said, everything's clear, from front to back, left to right. But this is how we actually see.

We'll focus on let's say, the man coming in in the trench coat. And then I will jump to the lady in the foreground. And you can see how there's this cone of vision, it's 60 degrees. And in the right in the middle of that everything is crystal clear in our central vision is very powerful. But everything outside the cone of 60 degrees starts to get blurry. Right, the kids on the right, the chair in the foreground, that's how we actually see we don't see everything, as in the first one all presented to us at once.

So look at how this goes down here. Our eyes are kind of really trying to create a narrative. It's assessing the painting. It's jumping from here to there and everywhere. And we're visually constructing a story in our mind as our eyes jumping around. So it's layer by layer building, meaning that's what our brain is trying to get us to do one way or another is to find meaning in something.

And so it might first look at the people's faces, and give information and put that layer down, then it might look at their clothes, might look at the room, the lighting, and start to put the pieces together. So our interpretations might feel somewhat instantaneous. I mean, they do feel instantaneous, you see something, all this happens so fast. It's as if it's all presented, at what at one time, but, but even though it may feel instantaneous, actually, it's composed of smaller units that make up a whole that our brains put together to construct the narrative. So it's a lot like a storyboard or experiencing a scene in a movie. Basically, we're painting and editing the painting in our mind.

So instead of thinking as a painting or photo as a static image, what have we thought of it as a series of sequential images? Now, that process would be more like how a film director approaches storytelling. The best artists, really good artists understand how the eyes process visual information and they leverage that behavior in their own work. In essence, we're recreating what the brain does. That's what we're going to do, we're going to recreate what the brain does on the canvas or paper in our portrait. Now, if you think of it, this happens to when you're painting a model, the model will pose for you for 20 minutes, and then they'll get up and take a break.

And you'll have something down on the, on the canvas of the paper, and then they'll come back, you'll work again, adding another layer of information, they'll get up and take a break and so on. It goes until you've built up this rich piece with all these layers. And it's a composite of someone. It's not that person all at once. So it's the same idea. That layer by layer, you're putting down your interpretation of what it is you see in front of you over time.

So it's sequential, it's dynamic, it's rich, and photographs cannot often capture that kind of richness, like a drawing or painting. Again, we're going to leverage this information to create a focal point, using the fact that our eyes see with the 60 degree cone of vision. So let's do this. Let's look at how we can use contrast as a tool to create focal point, we can use contrast values, edges, detail, and color. Let's see how it works. In this charcoal portrait piece that I did, I put the values in a certain place now it's maybe 30% of the piece.

The other 70% is not where the details and the values are sort of pumped up, so to speak. So the darkest and lightest values are right there with that, right eye and nose are in the center of his face. Okay, and then you have less contrast of values in the ear, the mouth, side of the head, everywhere else kind of falls down in the hierarchy. And then finally, you have the least amount of value contrast out by the top of the head and the shoulder and elsewhere. The edges, the most crisp, clear edges are right there. On the nose where that shadow of the orbit of the eye is cast and the upper eyelid itself, the lower eyelid, all that stuff is very crisp Chisel Hard cast shadows.

And then we have some little bit softer edges on the eyebrow itself, the cheek. And you can see this sort of diminishing contrast from crisp edges to firm edges to then completely lost or soft edges. amount of detail. Again, in between the square here is where I've concentrated all the detail in his eyes, nose, basically. So we've got wrinkles, skin, edge, contrast, value, contrast, eyelashes, and all that sort of stuff. And nowhere in the piece outside of this rectangle will be that much detail.

Pretty simple. And then we've got color so we've got Gentlemen, whoo here, awesome drawer painter that I love so much. And you can see he's got the most saturated color, they're in the nose and in the cheek on the left. And and a little less saturated under the eye, and the muzzle of the mouth, and then finally in the background. So we've got the most intense color, it's probably 20% of the piece, the rest of it starts to become less saturated, and then even muted green in the background, so we've got that warm, cool contrast. Maybe most of it's cool and dark, and less of it is warm and light.

So it's not equal 5050 and that creates visual variety, and that creates interest for viewers. All right, next step, we're going to talk about drawing techniques, line quality. There's essentially four different lines I want to talk about that will help describe your character's personality and capture them on the paper. I'll see you in the next video.