Looking at the room around you, you can sense intuitively where the various light sources are coming from. Our brain is fantastic at picking up the subtle cues of shadows, shading, and highlights to tell us not only the light source, but also the type of material. Is it hard and smooth? Furry? Rough? All of these textures can be visually identified with no conscious thought.

As a painter, you have to remember that the viewers of your art are all fluent in the way light acts without even knowing it.  We’ve seen it our whole lives. They might not be able to tell you why, but if your painting has clearly impossible or incorrect lighting, they will immediately sense that something is wrong. The majority of the times that I see a painting which appears “amateurish,” closer inspection reveals it is a failure of shading that has caused my brain to say “this isn’t realistic”. I’m just scratching the surface here too.

Consider a room with a chair next to a window (as in this photo “empty chair” by Alf Caruana)

Simply looking at this photo, you have a very reasonable sense of how far away from the window both you and the chair are. How? Because we intuitively understand the falloff of the intensity of light from a source. Further more we understand the intensity of daylight, and the way a room is softly filled with ambient light. If you painted this scene and the chair was geometrically located in the same place, but illuminated too brightly, as if right under the window, your brain would have conflicting messages about the chair’s location, and the painting would feel wrong.

I’ll rest my case now – that understanding light is important to a painter – and move on to the fun stuff.

First of all, a very basic and misunderstood concept. The northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun during the winter, which causes colder temperatures. We all know this, but why is it true? Many people (me included at one point) erroneously think it’s because we’re further away. This is false.  The fact is that the distance moved is insignificant compared to the total distance from the sun. The real reason is that the angle of the sun at its peak is reduced with respect to the ground.

Consider one square meter of sunlight traveling towards the earth. If you take a one square meter board and hold it normal (perpendicular in all directions) to the incoming beam, the board will capture 100% of the incoming light. However, if you angle the board at 45% for instance, it’s area to the sun is reduced and only a fraction of the light hits it. This means that the light per unit area is strongly dependent on the angle of incidence.

Another way to think of it is a flashlight shone at a wall. Shine it straight on and the total intensity of the light is concentrated on a very small area. Shine it at a very steep angle and the *same amount* of light is spread much thinner, meaning each square inch is far dimmer.

This is the first of two fundamental principles you must understand. It governs how much light a surface receives from a given source. If the surface is directly facing the light, it gets 100% of the intensity. At a 45% angle, roughly 50%. At a 90% angle and anything beyond it is in shadow. We will call this the amount of incident light.

Now we must consider what happens to the light after impact. Assuming we have an opaque surface (so no light passes through), it is either absorbed or reflected. Some light is always absorbed, so remember a reflected light source is never as intense as the original, and often significantly less so (in the case of a dark matte surface).

When rays hit a surface they bounce like billiard balls, off at an angle of reflection equal to their angle of incidence. So a parallel light source hitting a sphere reflects something like this:

The shades in the middle represent the amount of incident light at that point on the sphere. The middle of the sphere most directly faces the source, and so there is the most incident light. Near the edges the incoming light has been spread thin like the flashlight over the wall, so even though the rays still reflect, there is much less light to start with.

This is a simplification. In reality, the light rays scatter as they reflect (another reason they become less intense). This part is really important to getting your shading right! Unless you are looking directly along the line of reflection at the point you are seeing, you are only seeing diffusely scattered light! You can check the line of reflection by imagining that the object you are looking at is mirror coated. The line of reflection goes through the point on the object where you would see a reflection of the light source. It may not even be visible depending on the orientation. Due to scattering, each of the lines in the diagram above actually looks more like this:

The further away from directly on, the fewer percentage of photons at that point have been scattered, so you can imagine each ray as having the greatest intensity when viewed directly on, and diminishing intensity as viewed from a greater and greater angle off center.

rate of the diminishing intensity depends on the surface quality. For glossy surfaces, the majority of the incoming light reflects directly along the line of reflection. For matte surfaces, light is scattered widely, and the difference in intensity between viewing directly at the line of reflection or not is minimal.

One critical non-intuitive thing to point out here is that, due to reflected light, the shading of an object absolutely depends on where you view it from! You can see this in highlights, which will move across a surface as you walk around it, even though the object and light remain stationary. Of course, incident light levels remain constant, so the amount of light which could possibly be reflected from any given point is limited depending on it’s orientation to the source. But the percent of that potential incident light which actually makes it’s way into your eyeball is 100% dependent on the position of your eyeball.

Going back to the original reflection diagram, we can redraw it, but also include the angle of scattered light (smaller arrows) which actually makes it to our eyeball. Now you can see what I mean about how most of the light we see is indirect scattered light.

You can also see how the brightest point to the observer will NOT be the point which receives the most light. It has taken a while to get here, but this is the biggest mistake I see in shading. Circular objects lit from the side have their brightest and darkest points inside the edge, not at the edge.

A cylinder viewed in this orientation will have a light color at it’s leading edge, but much less intense than the total incident light because it is being viewed at a steep scattering angle. This is especially true of a glossy object which can appear very dark even on the illuminated edge. It will then get lighter going down the curve. Even though the amount of incident light is diminishing, the viewing angle is getting closer and closer to a direct reflection (the highlight) which is the brightest point.

If you can draw or imagine  rays of direct or scattered light when you paint (called ray-tracing) you will have a much easier time locating the shading gradients. You’ll also understand more concretely interesting phenomenon such as rim lighting, and reflected lighting in the shadows (not covered at all in this post, but absolutely essential to realistic painting). Of course this is an incredible simplification of illumination – but a reasonable attempt to cover the subject would easily fill a whole book. Speaking of which! All of these concepts and many more can be found in much more detail here: http://www.amazon.com/Light-Artist-Ted-Seth-Jacobs/dp/0823027686 (I have no association with this book, other than I really really like it).

There’s also a subtle Ferris Bueller joke (-:

The story is available through their digital reader here. Simply type in page 72.

I really enjoyed this part about the vertical scroll: “It has a certain feeling of discovery to it,” and the comments that the characters are more emotionally accessible than in some higher end productions. The lack of music, sound effects, or narration was mentioned again as a drawback and reinforces my plans to have sounds as well as narration for Petunia.

You can read the full review here.

A few scenes nearing the finish line!

I have approximately two thirds of the artwork for Petunia, and so it’s exciting to finally see some of the scenes near completion. It has been a slow slow process since acrylic painting was – at the start – a new medium to me. Thanks to everyone who continues to encourage and support me in this crazy project (-:

So, the vision for this scene is a leviathan sea creature rising from the deep and carrying Petunia up above the waves. I know I want it to be dramatic, and that I want the sea creature to be a massively imposing beast.

I almost always start of with a very small thumbnail sketch in pencil & watercolor. This lets me easily see all of the large color shapes & contrasts. So far, so good.

When I’ve got a thumbnail I’m happy with, I’ll do a larger ink & watercolor version. This time I tried switching the cloud layer, but because it has to blend with the previous image, I probably won’t keep it that way. This is my first attempt at creating the creature, and my first mistake. In hind sight I should have been doing pages and pages of creature sketches before ever getting to this point.

But, instead, I went ahead and started painting on the 14″ tall panel I have been using for the story. I got as far as you see here, before realizing I really wasn’t crazy about the creature, and needed to go back and rethink the design.

Ahh, here we go – that’s more like it, right?

So I take my favorite sketch, and re-draw it with a grid the size of the space I have to work. This allows me to draw freely first, and then fit the drawing to the picture space after. Now it’s just a matter of transferring the new creature onto the final painting.

To accomplish that I draw a scaled up grid over the existing painting using chalk. The chalk will easily wipe off with water so I much prefer it to pencil. Then I just copy the sketch onto the panel and start painting!

Hmmmm… Well, it doesn’t look right. This is supposed to be a leviathan of the deep. Cold blooded, lurking below the waves. Menacing. A predator at the top of the food chain. Not a happy go lucky blimp with wings and bug eyes. Drat. Back to the sketch-pad.

After another round of pencil sketches & various studies, I’m feeling pretty happy with this one. Take three.

By now you know the drill.

So I’ve taken this a bit farther in the rendering. I’m not 100% happy with the creature – it’s still not old and grumpy enough – but I think I can work with it with textures and small changes here and there. For now though, after all of these steps, the best thing I can do is put it aside and work on another scene for a while. It can take a few days for your mental image of the painting to catch up with what is already on the canvas, and I don’t want to rush things.

So that’s all for now folks! Hope you enjoyed this quick glimpse into the sometimes torturous process of illustration!

***UPDATE***

Hi again! So it has been almost two whole months since this post, and I wanted to share with you all the final steps. As I said, I did put it aside, and I went on to illustrating another scene. This scene features the same creature, but in a more menacing situation. Here’s a really bad photo showing the first take at painting that scene:

Getting the chance to start fresh helped me to rethink the teeth, the skin, the eyes, and a whole bunch of other things that had bothered me before. So, when I finally went back to the first scene, it was a breeze to get a way more impressive image:

Basically, my process is inherently iterative. I’m sure there are illustrators out there who can envision what they want right away and paint it – and I envy them! But for me it’s a process.

I’ve been working freelance doing graphic design for a children’s software program, so the art on Petunia has been somewhat neglected lately, but I have made some progress. Apologies for the horrible photo quality as usual.

UPDATE April 5th

New set up with panel #2

And, from the original post:

Studio setup

I’ve made some substantial progress on the artwork for Petunia, so I thought I’d upload a few photos. Keep in mind that a) it’s still very much a work in progress b) I’m photographing this will a very cheap camera and c) the finished painting will have a matte varnish so there won’t be nearly as much glare on the textures. That having been said, here are the photos!

Things are getting a bit messy too… I took this very short video of my paint/pallet shelf today:

That’s all for now

~apps4kids.net

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