Values and Light PDF Print E-mail
Sunday, 09 December 2007
(This is another tutorial I wrote a while ago for an English/German Magazine)

One of the most important aspects of a painting are Shadows, Light and colors in general. A lot of how you paint shadows depends on how your painting will look like and also what style it will end up in.

Being a semi realistic painter I will try to explain some of my personal views on those elements. Unfortunately to be able to talk about those aspects I have to get a bit theoretical first. But stay with me, it's worth your time..at least I tend to think so Smile

Let me introduce you to some of the theoretical terms first. It is quite crucial to know them in order to understand what you are painting:

The heart of a color

Color consist of three different parts:
Hue, Saturation and Value (or Brightness).

Hue is basically the light that gets bounced of or reflected from a surface and then finds the way into our eyes. If something appears green it means only the green parts of the light gets bounced off and every other aspect gets absorbed.

Saturation on the other hand defines how intense a color is. It's hard to not mix this with it's value which in terms is how dark or light a color appears.

If this was a bit confusing this might help:


Values are probably the most important aspects to consider. They are also the reason that we like black and white illustrations a lot. It is much harder to achieve the right values with colors. This is mainly the case because the more value something has (either dark or light) the less hue of the actual color it shows. You could also say that value is the relationship between the brightness of one color in regards to another. Sometimes also loosely referred to as contrast.
Values are extremely important in regards to texture and surfaces as well, how objects interact and to create forms.

It’s always a good idea to desaturate (turn into gray scale) your painting to check how your values are. In general you should have the biggest value contrast around the center of interest because your eye gets drawn to that point automatically. In general you should have most values in the mid range, then less in dark and lighter values. (highlight and shadows).
I think one could write a whole book about values only but generally make sure you have the whole range from very dark to very light in your painting.
Tip: An easy way in Photoshop is to add a layer at the top and fill it with black – then change the layer mode of that layer to Saturation. Now you can show or hide that layer to check back on your values ever so often.

Values are also sometimes tricky to “see correctly” since our brain makes us think that we see a different value than it actually is. That is particularly hard to see if you look at something with a smooth value transient like the example here. The difference from the darker part to the lighter part doesn't seem so obvious at first but if you check the both values next to each other they show a significant difference.
This is among the most important things to consider to give something a 3D feeling. Subtle changes in values can achieve just that.



Brainwork

Our brain likes to make things easy for us. Maybe you have gotten one of those e-mails where the words are all in different order like this:

iespDte the fact that some eettlrs are mxied up you can sitll read

Even though the letters aren't in the right order we can read this because your brain tends to skip certain steps and automates. This is also true for seeing the world around us.

The actual process of seeing something starts with our brain cells getting an impulse through light. The brain afterwards processes those impulse to create a 3D image. However in order to prevent an overflow of inputs the brain also simplifies some things we see or totally ignores parts of reality. Fact is also though, that we actually do see everything but it is stored in a different part of our brain.

Now what the hell is she talking about and why does she mention this?
One of the biggest challenges for an artist is to actually relearn how to see again. The most obvious aspect of this are colors.
Most people just assume that shadows are black (or at least black and white values) or/and highlights are white. Naturally they paint shadows with black and light with white. BIG NO NO!


In this picture you can see that I used the eyedropper tool to proof that the parts of the wall which are in bright light are not white at all but a slight hue into red.
If you look at the shadow it appears as slightly blue tinted gray. That's because the ambient light (in this case the blue sky) gets bounced of pretty much everywhere specially the Shadows. On the other hand if you take a look at the shadow on the wall beneath the wood roofs, those appear brownish/redish because the light from the wood gets reflected on the wall and tints it that color.

That said I have to admit that color picking a photograph is not the best or most accurate way. Instead you should go out and observe what you see. Try to see the colors as they actually are.

All those things we normally ignore but in order to make a believable and interesting painting we do need to keep those things in mind.

A few rules to remember:

There are a few rules which I always try to follow and which are good to remember while choosing and mixing colors:
Shadows are most of the time a darker version of the ambient light because the ambient light gets reflected/bounced of pretty much everywhere and thus mixes with the actual color of the object.

Example: if you have a scene in a forest, every color should have a slight green tint or the painting is not going to look believable and unified enough.

If an object casts a shadow of the same color the shadow does get much more saturated. This is specially visible if you stand outside and have one hand cast a shadow on your other. You will see that it creates a darker and much more saturated skin color as shadow color.
Colors bounce of and thus influence objects that are close to each other.

Example: Hold one of your hands close to say your shirt and see what happens to the skin which is nearest to the shirt. See that the shirt color is being reflected on your skin?


Using the theory

Now in Digital Art, specially in Photoshop we have tools which we can use to help us apply this knowledge easy. In this case the eyedropper tool and the color window are extremely handy.

For once you can use the eyedropper tool to sample from your ambient light and apply/mix it slightly colors of objects in your painting.

In this first example, examine the shadows cast from her fingers on her leg. They appear quite dark – probably even black to you. Now if you take a look at the left side you see a few color dots. Those are color picked and show the actual color I used to block on those shadows roughly.

You can also see the HSB slider and how the Hue, Saturation and Brightness are set for one of those colors. Notice that the saturation slider is all the way back to the right? That is because I have skin (from the fingers) cast shadow on skin (of the leg) thus I made the shadow really saturated.

Tip: If you don't have the color window go to window -> color (or click F6). Click the little arrow at the top right in the color window and chose “HSB Slider” in case you are in RGB or CMYK. It's easy to adjust your colors with this little slider as you can color pick an existing color and then move for example the saturation slider to the left or right without actually changing the hue of the color.




In this second example I want to show that you can have light cast into shadow parts. Specially in this case because her knee is lit by a lot of light which will reflect into the shadow part of her arm. You can pretty much color pick the actual highlight and use it on the part that you think will be affected by that light (in some cases you might want to adjust the color but it does work in this fast and rough way).



If you start to look out for little things as this in your surroundings you will train your brain to see what it normally hides from you and it will for sure enhance your painting in a huge way.

Since this was already a lot of theory to read about I will go into a bit more detail including shadow forms next time.
 
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