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Thank you for your patience while we meet our new grandchild.
— Steve
The Fairview Finder 3.0
A Composition Tool for Painters
Frame your scene. Choose your story. Paint with confidence.
A beautiful view doesn’t automatically become a strong painting.
The Fairview Finder helps you test crops, compare painting proportions, simplify values, and decide what matters before the first brushstroke.
Version 3.0 includes two composition tools: the Standard Fairview Finder and the Square Fairview Finder.
Two Finders. Four working surfaces. One free manual. $49.
The simple tool for stronger paintings.
A Beautiful Scene Is Not Yet a Painting. Nature gives us everything at once.
Every tree. Every window. Every cloud. Every reflection. Every small change in light.
A painting needs something different. It needs selection.
What matters most? Where should the eye go first? Which shapes support the story? What can be simplified, softened, moved, or removed?
The Fairview Finder puts those decisions in your hands while the painting is still full of possibility.
Everything You Need to Start Stronger
The Standard Fairview Finder
Test five common painting proportions before choosing your canvas. Find the crop that best supports the subject, focal area, and story.
The Square Fairview Finder
Explore square compositions, centered designs, symmetrical arrangements, and crops created for square panels or social media.
Design Check
Use the front surfaces to study composition, focal placement, proportion, and value structure.
Story Check
Flip the Finders over to consider what drew you to the subject, where the eye should travel, and what can be left out.
The Fairview Finder Manual
Free to download the complete digital manual with practical instructions, examples, and a simple pre-painting routine.
Three Decisions Before You Paint
Frame the Scene
Hold up the Finder and move it through the landscape. Test different crops and proportions until the subject begins to organize itself.
Simplify the Design
Squint through the window. Group the scene into a few large value shapes. Look for clarity before detail begins competing for attention.
Choose the Story
Ask why this scene stopped you. Decide what the painting is about and protect that idea from unnecessary information.
Design gives clarity.
Story gives meaning.
Freshness gives life.
Design on the Front. Story on the Back.
The Design Check
The front surfaces help you frame, compare and commit.
Five proportional windows let you test different canvas formats. Golden Ratio marks help you consider focal placement. Classic composition patterns suggest ways to organize the scene. Value guides help you simplify background, middle ground, and foreground.
These aren’t rules that make the painting for you. They’re reminders that help you see.
The Story Check
The back surfaces address a different problem.
A painting can be well designed and still have nothing to say.
The Story Check uses twelve prompts to help you find the reason for the painting. What caught your attention? Where should the viewer pause? What feeling belongs here? What can be left unsaid?
The front helps organize what you see.
The back helps clarify why it matters.
Made for the Field. Useful in the Studio.
The Fairview Finder is lightweight, durable, portable, and built to work without batteries, screens, or another app.
Use it while painting outdoors, working from a still life, planning from reference material, teaching a workshop, or reviewing a painting that isn’t holding together.
It works across watercolor, oil, acrylic, gouache, drawing, and other visual media because the underlying questions remain the same:
What is the design?
What is the story?
What deserves your time?
The Fairview Finder Philosophy
A Tool Designed to Make Itself Unnecessary
The Fairview Finder isn’t meant to replace your instincts. It is meant to train them.
Each time you frame a scene, test a crop, simplify the values, and identify the story, you are teaching your eye what to look for.
The decisions become faster. The instincts become sharper. The habits begin to stay with you.
One day, you may stand in the field without the Finder and make those decisions naturally.
That is the point.
Not a product you depend upon forever. A practice that becomes part of how you see.
What Artists are saying
“Such a totally awesome concept!.”
“I will be so happy to get mine! It takes the guesswork out! So many times, I have chosen the wrong size canvas for the painting! Thank you for coming up with this!.”
“I'm so impressed that the Fairview Finder serves to help "see" the potential composition clearly ( as expected), and additionally has printed reference information to help with value, contrast, and movement right on its margins!”
“Landscapes landscapes landscapes! I stare at them every day and still can't quite get them right. Anything to help would be priceless!”
“Thank you very much, Steve. The "grounded value motifs" will be a great tool for guiding thumbnails and the design of larger works. ”
“The viewfinder looks amazing to use outside and guides us to focus on a view that supports our intended point of interest and composition.
I would be curious to try using it another way. We all have these great first washes that we love and then ruin in the second layer. Could the viewfinder be used to look at that first wash and help us plan the second layer regarding placing points of interest, composition, and values?
You could even cover the first wash with acetate and draw in some general guidelines to test out compositions… I would love to try that!”
“I am really enjoying using mine..it sure helps determine what areas in the scene I think would work!”