Eye Lines Guiding The Viewer in Illustration

Artists and illustrators use tricks which tell the viewer where to look. Since humans tend to naturally follow the gaze of others, one focusing trick is to create eye lines all pointing to the focus of the work.

In the Norman Rockwell image below, the viewer’s eye is drawn straight to the dog. Notice how Rockwell does this. Almost every single character is looking at the dog, except for one guy who is looking at us and pointing to the dog. The characters looking at the dog also form a circle arond the dog, placing the dog at centre of that circle, though not at the mathematical circle of the artwork. (Compositionally, that wouldn’t look good.)

Rockwell has also utilised various examples of ‘pointing’. A boy’s violin case also seems to point towards the dog. An artist uses his paintbrush. Even the postie is holding something that seems to point to the dog. (I can’t work out exactly what it is, but that doesn’t matter.)

Norman Rockwell Road Block – Issue of The Saturday Evening Post

Fur die moderne hausfrau from ‘Stern’, 1965

The Schoolgirls’ Own Annual 1930

The Schoolgirls’ Own Annual 1930 “all for a good cause”

W. Clackens for ‘Lillie’ by Harris Merton Lyon in McClures Magazine 1909

Robert Fawcett (1903 – 1967)

Barbara Shermund 1947 (Esquire Magazine)

Japanese fairytale deer

Children’s Bible Stories

illustration from Minn of the Mississippi, written and illustrated by Holling Clancy Holling (Houghton Mifflin, 1951)

Antonio Lupatelli (1930 – 2018) (pseudonym Tony Wolf).

Louis Wain Annual 1914. Published by John F Shaw & Co

Václav Sivko, Illustration from Modern Tales and Fables, 1967 1967

When Charlie’s longed-for brother is born with a serious heart condition, Charlie’s world is turned upside down. Upset and afraid, Charlie flees the hospital and makes for the ancient forest on the edge of town. There Charlie finds a boy floating face-down in the stream, injured, but alive. But when Charlie sets off back to the hospital to fetch help, it seems the forest has changed. It’s become a place as strange and wild as the boy dressed in deerskins. For Charlie has unwittingly fled into the Stone Age, with no way to help the boy or return to the present day. Or is there … ?

What follows is a wild, big-hearted adventure as Charlie and the Stone Age boy set out together to find what they have lost – their courage, their hope, their family and their way home.