Tip 4: Alter focus

The principles of detail that can be used as an indicator of depth can also be used to draw the eye to a particular part of a scene.

Our eyes are drawn to visual complexity. Photographers and filmmakers use a camera’s short depth of field to ensure that the viewer’s eye is drawn to the subject, which appears in sharp focus while the rest of the frame remains blurred.

While we can replicate these effects in our drawings, it is important to remember that they are not the effects of human perception, but an element of visual language that we have learnt to read through watching films and looking at photographs.

By spending more time on one part of a drawing than another, we naturally draw the viewer’s eye to that area of greater detail where our pencil dwelt for longer, allowing brief mark making to replace the camera’s blur as an indicator of detail.