Moby Dick and Focal points

This Moby Dick illustration has been stuck in work flow purgatory (My bottom flat file drawer) for a long time. I started it with inspiration from John Hendrix’s The Worst of Times illustration series and it moved along well for a while but upon looking from a distance, it felt cluttered and unfocused. The difference I’m sure is that Mr. Hendrix probably had a game plan going into his compositions. I however approached this illustration with “ it would be sweet to squash a rowboat with whale teeth” and “It would be wild to show a fella leaping through the air towards a giant eye” etc. etc. Classic too many chefs in the kitchen scenario but my chefs happened to be stuff a whale just stomped on. Luckily I stumbled on Rob Levin’s article Focal Points at Medium.com. turns out I had lots of different focal points, each one rivaling the other. To clarify my narrative I ended up zooming in and omitting excess. This allowed the directional lines and the “isolation”(from the article) focal points to shine. Interestingly, if I move the crop and omit other figures, the diagonal lines and negative space become more evident. The filter Stamp in Photoshop is pretty helpful here to highlight directional line and those isolation focal points. Less is more apparently when it comes to highlighting whale destruction.