Drawing Lessons: Use Focus and Detail to Sharpen Your Drawing

Drawing Lessons: Use Focus and Detail to Sharpen Your Drawing

Focus is not how clear your drawing is. Instead, the focus of your drawing is the subject. It is what you want the viewer to see. And often it is what you want the viewer to feel.

I use a few tricks to draw a viewer’s eye to the subject in my drawings, to sharpen my focus.

I use composition. For example, I might place a child with a sad expression more toward a corner of my paper like you can read about in my lesson on composition, so the child would appear to be off-center, lonely—even sadder.

I use shading to sharpen the focus. For example, I might draw more contrast between the light and the shadow on a jubilant child’s face, so the child would appear to be closer to the light—brighter!

And I use detail. In the following commission for example, I drew the baby girl’s face with photographic detail compared to the way I drew her shirt, so the girl’s face would appear to stand out. I wanted the viewer to see her face most of all and get the urge to kiss her little cheeks. Just like I felt when I first saw her!

If you want to see more drawing lessons, including more drawing lessons from Mike Theuer, check out the “Drawing Lessons” section of Studio 602.