Do you remember the notebook paper you used in school that had blue lines and a red margin on the left? When I was a kid I constantly got scolded for writing in the margins because that was a forbidden area that was supposed to remain blank. You can apply this same principle to all four sides of your paintings—the “margins” being in proportion to the scale of your painting surface. This area is also known as the peripheral area.
Inside the peripheral area, it’s best to avoid:
The peripheral area will simulate how detail fades in the peripheral vision of the eye. Applying this will help the eye agree with how things are naturally seen. The objective is to encourage your viewers to visually wander within the center portion of your painting so they do not exit it easily and will not get distracted by too much interest being created near the edges.
In most art instruction, there is usually reference to a ten-value scale, but this would only apply if the artwork is inside a room. Outdoors in nature, you can see hundreds of values because of the sun’s intensity. Trying to replicate this light in a painting is an impossible task. So here, paint what you see, goes out the window. Again we need to implement ways to mimic reality.
Before the Cadmium pigments were invented to add a glow to colors, the Old Masters had real problems depicting sunlit areas. They had to purposely exaggerate the dark areas to compensate. This practice contradicted nature... until the Impressionists started using Cadmiums and became successful at mimicking sunlight.
In this painting of a small fishing town in Nova Scotia, distractions have been reduced in the section marked as peripheral area. There was a choice of placing the window where it was originally, on the right edge of the canvas. After applying these principles, the window was moved to a better location in the painting.