[ tascha.ch ]

Thanks to Chris Arlidge from steeldolphin.com for input.

The most important thing we need to keep in mind is that light bounces off of objects and special surfaces only appear as colored because they swallow certain parts of the lightrays and reflect others. If something appears green it means only the green particles of the light get bounced off of the surface. Black for example absorbs every colour.

Now let’s take this knowledge into consideration while painting.
Unfortunately it’s not THAT easy and sometimes a bit unlogical. Make it a habit to study light and colour whenever you can. Bored on the train? Take a close look at the person sitting opposite of you. How does the light react on the skin? What about the shadow? Can you make out it’s real colour or do you let your brain fool you?

Here are a few things that I took into consideration while working this painting:

1: The ambient light gets mixed into the skin colour on the shoulder part more then on other places because they are exposed more to the light coming from above.

2: The light bouncing off of clothing does reflect on skin and the other way round. It’s probably not that visible but if you look closely you see that some of her skin colour is mixed into the corset and the other way round. You probably notice that I used a blue which appears a bit too saturated for the shadow underneath but I wanted her to “pop” out a bit. So I was sacrificing some of the realistic look for artistic freedom.

3: If a color get’s bounced back off a surface with the same color it doesn’t get darker but more saturated. Skin is a good example. If you look closely you will see that for example the inside if your hand appears to be a pretty satured red if you go outside and close your hand slightly. Here we do have a hard contrast between the highlighted part of the skin and the shadow. The skin color is a bit overexposed to the natural light coming from the top right. That means the colour will only get visible at the edge between the shadow and the highlighted part (visible here as more saturated redish skin color). Another part where you can see this is the part where the upper lips cast’s a slight shadow on the lower lip. This part is always more saturated then other parts of the lips.

Shadows are almost never really black. They normally reflect the ambient color sometimes in an even more saturated way. Rule of thumb:
If you have warm highlights you normally get cooler shadows and the other way round.
Shadows also have different edges. There are typically two types of shadows, form and cast. Form shadows often (like the shadow on the curving side of the thigh) have ambient light seeping into them and are usually soft edged. Cast Shadows don’t usually have as much ambient light in them as the ambient light is being blocked, but they do graduate in density the further away from the object that is casting the shadow.

Form shadows are the shadows on the side of an object that is facing away from the primary light source.
The Cast shadow is a shadow that falls upon another object as a result of that object blocking light from the primary light source:

1: Some more saturated green has been mixed in where the shadow changes over to the more brighter part of the skin because the light bouncing off from the ground will appear greenish.

2: The cast shadow of the upper leg has a harder edge where it is close to the object it is casting its shadow on. The further away it gets from the obect the more blurry it appears (diffraction). There is even a little hint of bumped light on the lower part of her upper tigh. This is reflecting from the exposed highlight parts of her lower leg.