Line is another important item in the artist's toolbox. The tiniest dot on a page will show up, so our lines are important. The lines are how we create a subject on the page.

Betty Edwards, book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, is the best book I've ever read on learning how to draw.

If you get her book, and do the demonstrations in it, you'll learn to draw. She has wonderful lessons to teach us to place our lines in the correct positions to create sensitive, lively drawings.

I'll post a drawing I did here, using her techniques. The good thing about learning to draw from her examples, is that you'll be able to draw any subject, you won't be limited to creating certain things. The way she teaches us to draw, the more complicated a subject looks, the easier it is to create!

Creating a focal point isn't difficult, but it's essential to the success of a painting. The focal point is the area that holds the interest of our viewer and sucks them into the painting.

There are basic tools artist's use to make this happen.

Most important is placement of your focal point, for this study the Golden Mean. There's a wealth of information and links on this page.

After you learn ideas for placing the focal point, we can create more interest there by keeping that point in the painting the place where we put the lightest lights and the darkest darks right next to each other.

Plan the painting so you create a "trail" that points to the focal point in your painting. This "trail" can be a line of dark, a line of light, an exciting path of intricate design....anything that directs your eye where you want it to go.

In the painting below, you can see the rabbit's eye is the focal point, the lightest light in the painting is placed next to the darkest dark. It brings your eye, right to the eye of the rabbit.

The focal point is placed away from the center of the painting, toward one of the edges.

This is a design element. If you look at the photo you're working from, or the scene in front of you, (if you're painting from life), you can find the light areas, the dark areas, and the mid tone areas. Take these areas and group them together so they create large, interesting patterns. There are many times you can take several areas of shadow, and link them together. It simplifies your painting, and gives you a large shape instead of many small shapes.

This helps your painting because one area will have dominance over another... You can give the dominance to light, shadow, or mid tones, which ever you choose, but one of these needs to dominate the painting.

The painting included here, uses mid tones for dominance, with light tones coming in next, and dark tones as the least dominance. The dark tones in this painting form a kind of cone that goes up the center of the painting.