Hey guys, this is Matt Cor from www.controlpaint.com and today's principle of design video is going to be all about motion. Now in the past we've talked about emphasis and focal points. And what those do is help tell the viewer where to look. Well, motion is exactly the same thing. It's one more tool you can use to control where the viewer's eyes go when they're looking at your painting. And since this is an inherently invisible aspect of the composition, I'm going to show you some of my paintings and draw some arrows over top to explain how I am directing the user's eyes around my canvas. So first off, we've got this bug monster. And this is a very simple diagram. The goal is always to point the viewer towards the focal point. And here my main focal point is the monster's face. So I arranged the arms and the pinches in sort of a circular motion in which the eyes are led around the perimeter of the image. And then when they reach the bottom of the claws, they look back up towards the head. And this is intentional. At the thumbnail stage of this image, this was the flow I had in mind. And really all the rest was just polished. All right, this one's a little more complicated. There's a few more elements. But the ideas are the same. I want the viewer to look at the focal point. So for this one, I made sure to put a single face in the image because people love looking for faces. Beyond that, I have the large angles of the bird's wings, creating straight lines pointing directly at the focal point. There's also a large bird flying in a vector that is straight aimed at the face. And then I use repetition. And repetition is a great way to lead an eye through the image. So you can see in this flock of birds, all the birds match. So I know if there's a big one, it's up close to the viewer. And if there's a tiny one, it's far away off in the distance. And so I created a general sweeping formation, leading the eye from the middle right, down around the image, and back up towards the bird's face. And all of these choices were intentional, made to control the viewer's eye. This next image poses the challenge. Here there is a scuba diver escaping from a really big monster. And in some ways, your eye follows the scuba diver's gaze right off the left side of the image. And that's a bit dangerous. Since I want to keep your eyes looking at the focal point, which is the monster's teeth, I made sure to illuminate a bit of the monster's tail to give a circular path to bring the eye back around. And this is going to help stop your eye from going straight off the left side of the page. So it brings it around. And then it follows the neck, which is also illuminated, straight back up to the face. And this gives you a nice circular motion that your eye can keep doing this loop over and over. And hopefully, their eye won't leave off the left side of the page in the direction the diver is looking. This is a great example of an image that has nothing moving inside of it. It's a city, totally still. But I made the composition in such a way that it has a spiral motion to it, which is pretty pleasing to a viewer. So your eye is actively moving around this spiral, going deeper and deeper into the canvas. And in doing so, it gives it a feeling of activity, even if the subject matter is very still. So far, all of my examples have been very environment-centric. Well, here's a character standing on a white background. Turns out all the same rules apply. Once again, my goal is to get the viewer looking at the focal point. And here, a lot of the character's acting is coming through in his facial expression. So I want the viewer to see that. As a result, I have large sweeping curves of the clothing that point up the form. And the composition is so important that I allowed it to dictate some of this character design. So if you were to follow this curve up through the neck of the instrument, I don't want to lose the viewer's eye straight off the top of the page. So I made sure the neck of the instrument pointed back at his face. And it gives it that distinctive, right-angle look to it. But that was ultimately decided on based on my compositional flow. So even if you have no background and just a single character design, you should still use the idea of motion to direct a viewer's eye through the image. If you do it correctly, they'll have no idea that you're intentionally moving their eyes around. They'll just find the image pleasing. It's amazing how it works. My guess would be you're already doing this to some degree without even realizing it. As visual people, we just have a sort of built-in sense of this. But once you know about it, you can look for it all the time. I think it's kind of fun to go back through old art pieces you've made and to try and make diagrams like this. Is it helping the image or is it hurting the image? It's also a great exercise to look at some old master paintings and try doing the same diagrams. You can really learn a lot from how an old master has moved someone's eyes around a canvas. It's pretty cool stuff. So thanks for watching guys and stay tuned for future videos.