← artdaily

Focal Placement

place the subject where the frame wants it

round
–
score
–
best
–

Loading…

 

Deciding where the subject sits

A round generates four 3:2 frames, each with a horizon, a wash and often a rock or bush. The prompt names the subject and its facing, and draws it, so you see it before you mark. Scribble a quick thumbnail where it belongs: the centre of your mark is the placement, so a shaky scribble and a plain tap land alike. Arrows nudge, enter locks. Frame one carries a faint ring around one good spot, so the first mark is not blind; the last frame tightens the full-credit radius and says so.

Placement is the decision made before anything is drawn well or badly, and it is the part of composition that survives without taste: nearness to a thirds crossing, room ahead of the facing, clearance from a second element. Room in front of whatever the subject faces is the rule most easily forgotten, and here it stops being a feeling and becomes a percentage. Only the guidelines are scored — the taste in a composition is left where it belongs, with you. Each frame is re-rolled until a search over the same scoring proves a full 100 is placeable.

How the 100 splits three ways

Nearness to the thirds carries 50, with full marks within 6% of the frame’s diagonal of the closest intersection. Breathing room carries 30: the fraction of the frame lying ahead of the facing, full at a half or more. Separation carries the last 20 — stay 18% of the frame’s width clear of the secondary element, or take an automatic 20 when there is none. No AI grades any of it: the three numbers are hand-written geometry — a distance, a fraction, a distance — and the ghosted best placement is that same arithmetic run across the frame to find where it peaks. The reveal puts all three on the sheet: the grid, the shaded room ahead with its percentage, the ring to stay outside, and a ghost of the best placement that frame allows. The reveal also ranks the four thirds anchors behind that ghost, so a near miss shows which crossing would have paid better.

More composition drills: Counterweight · Crop It · the whole catalogue