How Your Eye Moves by Christopher Schink

When we are just getting started, most artists will concentrate on learning the fundamentals of their art, anatomy, perspective, and color theory. Once those fundamentals become familiar, how do we bring them all together into a painting that draws our viewer in? As artists, we can learn about the various elements within our paintings and train our eyes to follow the different visual forces as they come together to create a striking display that captures the viewer's attention.

This means that understanding how the human eye moves can help you create a more eye-catching piece of art! Cheap Joe's explores How Your Eye Moves by Christopher Schink to get a deeper look into all the aspects of creating a visually arresting piece.

How Your Eye Moves details the movement of our eyes through composition. Viewers often selectively look at what they think is most important, a processing method or behavior known as selective attention. Schink’s article presents a better understanding of how our eyes take in a lot more visual information than our brains can consciously process, making viewers want to focus on the most compelling information first.

Schink recommends specific techniques we can use as artists to speed up visual processing, reduce cognitive load and increase comprehension, which impacts how the viewer perceives your pieces. These techniques allow us to:

• Guide the viewer's eye along an intended path

• Guide the viewer's eye to the most critical information or scene within our composition

Find out how to present your pieces with value, contrast, hue, intensity, direction, shapes, sizes, and textures, giving the viewer the needed information to direct or pull their attention. Read on to learn more about exactly what we need to do within our artwork to direct the eye where we wish it to go.

Discovering new ways to express ourselves and capture the attention of our viewers is just one of the many beautiful aspects of composition, whether through art or graphic design. We hope that we continue to encourage artists of all kinds to create and improve new work by sharing tips, tricks, thoughts, and inspiration in articles like these from Cheap Joe's.