Painting Lesson - Spotlight Effect
Ever notice how some paintings seem to draw you into them. Some of them hold your attention and direct your eyes to a very strong almost profanity of interest. So how do they do that? What makes them so compelling? Well there is always a number of things which work together to do this, but, it’s surprising how often a spotlight effect can be seen doing this in all number of paintings throughout history, right back to the renaissance, when they first started thinking about lighting effects. So what is the spotlight effect? Here’s basically what’s happening, pretty basic, right. Now let’s try that with an image, here’s a nice one from my local beach. Nice action shot but, other than that not very riveting. So let’s put a spotlight on it, better already isn’t it. It’s telling your eye what the important part of the image is - the main concept. And it literally forces the eye to center on the subject because in our eyes naturally look for the light area in any situation. What could we do to make this image even more compelling? Let’s try blurring the edges which aren’t on the center focus, that’s even better isn’t it. This is just exaggerating something the eye does naturally. We can't focus on everything at once, so everything outside our small focus area becomes blurry. Is there anything else we could do to make this image much better? Well as a painter I always try to have unity on my paintings, especially color unity. So let’s try adding a common warm color to the image, yeah, nice. So, let’s compare it to the original, yes, so what do you think? Well let me tell you, it’s pretty easy doing all these spotlighting on the computer but how do we do it in a painting? Let’s see at a couple to see how you can do it. Okay, here’s one from Monet’s popular series. See where the spotlight area is? It’s pretty subtle here, but how he did it was a two stage process. First of all he painted the sky in thick paint and scumbles, the sky getting darker near the top as it naturally does. And the water getting darker in the foreground, which is also natural. But then after the painting dried and he looked at it for a while, he’s decided that he wants to create more of the spotlight effect to bring attention into the area down the river. So he makes a very thin mix of glaze of alizarin crimson and linseed oil, or any oil painting medium, and wipes this over the area he wants to subdue. What he also achieves by doing this is more unity in the colors under the glaze killing 2 birds with one stone. Let’s look at one of my paintings now, this one is called helping hand. This was all painted wet in wet. I didn’t wanna rely in glazing to achieve the spotlight effect so I plan out before I started there, I would progressively darken the colors and blur the edges as the painting move away from the two figures. Here’s another one painted wet in wet. Again I planned ahead on this one, knowing that I wanted to make a spotlight effect. However I did end up glazing a little over the reflections in the foreground to darken even more than I initially planned. Note too that the brush strokes get larger and more expressive as they get farther away from the spotlight center. This is one way of creating edges which are more blurry than the focus area. The paint is thinner in these areas too, which also tells you that I started painting in these loose areas and worked my way inwards finishing the painting more thickly in the focus area. Now let’s have a look at some paintings that could possibly be made better with a spotlight effect. And here’s some paintings where the spotlight effect has already been put to good use. Well that’s it. I hope you enjoyed this bit of information. Now that you know all about the spotlight effect, I challenge you to use it in your next painting. See how dramatic you can make it. If you like to learn some more great painting stuff, just check out the lessons on the website. Till next time. Happy painting.