Artists report making intentional decisions about composition in order to guide viewers’ eyes through a painting. In order to examine the degree to which artists’ intuitions about composition are accurate, we tracked the eye movements of individuals viewing watercolor paintings for the first time, and compared their eye movement patterns to the predictions of the artists. We report on the efficacy of adopting methods from other disciplines for analyzing sequential eye movement data relative to a two-dimensional images, focusing especially on the use of sequence analysis and circular statistics.