BA1 - Light, Colour & Shadow Fundamentals

What is Light?

When working with art, light is one of the key components to get your artwork look one step closer to reality. Light can help us with colour, form and distance. In this post i will go through why Light is so important and how it works. 

How does Light work?

Since we perceive colour by the help of light it is very important what kind of surface the colour is bound to. To explain how light works we have to dive deeper into three main areas: Absorbtion, Reflection and Refraction.

Absorption

If the surface the light is bouncing to is absorb-able the colour itself and it's saturation will be effected. 

Reflection

If the surface is reflecting the light, it will effect the colours diffuse. If light get's reflected it will always bounce off the object with the opposite angle.

If the surface that the light hits is uneven (Bumpy) the light will still bounce off in the opposite angle it hit from. 

Refraction

Refraction means that the light is travelling through the object. The material of the object does effect the amount distortion that will occur. 

Those three are the main ways how lighting works. Using these different ways that light can travel through materials we can get different effects. We will take a look of some of these effects now.

Bounced Light

Bounced Light means when light bounces off a certain object/material and illuminates surrounding surfaces. As described in the picture below, you can see that the ball is originally not green but because of the close by wall is green the light that bounces off it makes the ball get a green tint to it.

Sub-Surface Scattering

Sub-Surface Scattering occurs when light travels through slightly translucent objects, like leafs or grapes for instance. 

Shadows

A shadow occurs when light gets obscured by an object. The shape and intensity of a shadow is based on the light's intensity and position. The shadow itself is always strongest close to the object and the shadow fades the further away from the object it gets.  This effect is known as Dynamic Occlusion.

Colour

To fully describe what colour is i would have to go on forever so i will try keep it as short and simple as possible. The very basics of colour is that it is light power versus wavelength. For instance the reason why we see the sky as blue is because it has the shortest wavelength so that is the colour our eye catches first from all the different colours wavelength's. If red for instance would have a shorter wavelength interval than blue we would perceive the sky as red instead. 

Colours are very relative and can be changed by many different factors. On objects the colours can be different depending on the material of the object, it's environment and the person's eye and brain that perceives the colours. Different people can perceive colours differently depending on their viewing angles and such.

Colour in Photoshop

When working with colour in Photoshop it is important that you know how the HSV picker works. I have made a picture that shows the basics of it.

Colour Tempature

Colour Temperature is the degree of warmth a painting has. It can have a great impact on the atmosphere of your painting. Here you can see a scale of the different warmth's. 

Light Analysis

For my first picture to do a light analysis of i have chosen a piece of Concept Art from the game "Dishonored" 

In this picture we can see various kinds of lighting. The strongest kind of lighting in this picture is bounce lighting. As there are no light source inside the building itself the only light source is the sky outside that bounces with the help of the water and uses bounced lightning to lighten up the interior. Cause of the mix of bounce light and the green murky water the interior also get's a green tint to it cause of the light. If for instance there would be no water and the chandelier in the roof would be lit this room would probably appear a lot less green.

As for my second picture to study i choose a concept art piece from the game "Assassin's Creed: Revelations"

In this piece we can see several light sources. We have a strong directional light coming from the roof and several torches lighting up the surrounding areas. While the lighting from the roof delivers a very cold light the torches delivers a sense of warmth to them. Having the cold lighting on top of the chest is a clever move to attract your eyes to it since it's so different to the surrounding areas.