Lesson 2: The Terminator (Line)

The Study for this lesson can be found here: Study 2: Notan

Establishing Visual Hierarchy

School of Athens by Raphael

There’s a lot of people in this scene, but you know exactly where to look at. How?

They may look very different, but this painting shares the same concept:
Large simple areas of rest make your eyes want something complicated. Areas that are
complicated make your eyes want to rest on something simple. By interleaving them
together, we push and pull the eyes to follow invisible lines around the picture. The goal of
the artist is to carefully craft the place where the gaze ends up.
Regardless of whether we’re drawing a crowd scene of philosophers or a single portrait,
we use areas of rest and areas of complexity to drive the attention of the picture to the
important parts. Usually a picture has only one, this is called the “focal point.” You can
think of it as the central argument.

As a child, I owned the puzzle set for School of Athens. I repeatedly took it apart and put
it back together. Even though I didn’t understand at the time what artistic principle I was
looking at, I noticed that some pieces were always easier to locate than others. For
example, Plato and Aristotle (in class, I incorrectly identified Aristotle as Socrates, sorry!)
sit on the vanishing point, as well as the point of highest contrast for the painting, so they
were always easy to place. In comparison, the ceiling was always very hard to assemble.
The center is the vanishing point, the focal point, and the point of highest contrast and
saturation. The artist really wanted you to understand his central argument.

What happens when you have more than one?

When you have these two focal points, they compete for priority. Notice the jewelry and
the face here, competing for your attention. This is caused by the visual complexity in the
jewelry
If you continue ramping up the visual complexity of the jewelry, at some point, the
subject of the painting will change, back to one focal point, on the hairpin. (Perhaps
you could use this to sell a fancy hairpin)
It’s all about the relative hierarchy of the objects in the scene.In the end, it depends on
the kind of story that you want to tell.
What happens when you don’t have a focal point?

Compared the picture below to the two pictures above. Curiously, it is organized in terms
of rest areas and complex areas: it pushes and pulls our eyes, but since there’s no focal
point, it’s hard to tell what is going on at a glance. There’s no location where our gaze
rests.

The garden of earthly delights, Hieronymus Bosch

Why is this picture so strangely organized? It’s function is a clue to its presentation. This
painting is a secular triptych. Meaning, it’s a piece of furniture, a medieval home
entertainment system of sorts. It doesn’t rely on first read impressions: it has a lot of
little details that you can only see when you step close to it, unlike Raphael’s painting,
which is all the way up on a ceiling, or the niji generation, which is meant to hit you at a
glance.

Raphael’s organization methods have remained timeless. In contrast, you rarely see
paintings organized like Hieronymus Bosch’s these days: the general modern principle is
that the first read must convey a strong focal point: people simply don’t have the time
for a second read.

I’ve always thought this picture was funny, because it is a list of all the things you ought
not do, but listed in extreme detail: (“you definitely should not stick a bouquet of flowers
into somebody’s butt, certainly not like the way I have demonstrated here.”) I’m sure
whichever medieval family owned this piece had some amusement over this.

When it comes down to it, there are many possible ways to organize a painting. After all,
tastes change with time and function. We’ll teach many of these in this course, but today,
we’ll focus on a single one. Remember, our job is to create a focal point, so we can
safely convey our idea from our minds to the minds of our audience.

The most tried and true method of organization in human history is this: shove all the
mess to one side of the room, and keep the other side clean.

The All-Mighty Terminator Line

This first visual organization concept we will explore is value, which is to say,
organization by brightness.

To establish a value structure, we will sort the brightness into our picture into 2 buckets,
either light or dark. The very important line which separates dark into light is called the
terminator line.
How to Organize Value Structure

<aside> 💡 Divide your picturing into two tones, using a terminator line. Draw details only

on one side of the terminator line, not the other.

</aside>

Rendered light - emotional, mysterious scenes

Carravagio’s st. Jerome

Mead Schaeffer’s Monte Cristo

Mead Schaeffer’s Monte Cristo

dean cornwell

You can also do it the other way around:

Rendered shadow - comforting, soft moments

from illustrator washanapple
from illustrator washanapple

Unusual: anime girls with rendered light

from illustrator REDUM
Actually, when you can sculpt a perfect terminator line, you don’t need to render
very much.

The hatsune miku music box, illustration by rella

Rimlight, the Ultimate Terminator

Line

Rimlight is this form of organization, taken to the extreme.

The elegance of rimlight

from illustrator washanapple

The majesty of rimlight

league of legends debonair draven splash art

The power of rim light!

monster university concept art

niji loves rim light

(I’m sorry, niji users)

Rimlight is a little bit overdone, I admit, but it is very convenient

Controlling the Level of Detail

Complicated compositions like this rely on adhering to value organization in order to read
well. By keeping the terminator line and the light side clean, the artists here can fill the
rest of the picture with detail without overwhelming the audience.

Cafe Cuties splash art from league of legends

It all starts from the division of light and shadow: You can see the entire painting from the
terminator line:
from illustrator cmpovar

The ultimate goal is to draw in a way that doesn’t move from the initial terminator line.
Once you organize the hierarchy of a painting, you must not go tearing it back down.
From: illustrator RDJlock

If there’s one study that you take away from this class, let it be this one! It forms the
backbone of how we organize information on the canvas.

Remember, drawing is thinking! To convince our audience of a concept, we must first

organize it clearly in our own minds!