Lighting Exercise WIP - Painting Darkness
- GenreChowderStudios
- Apr 16, 2018
- 2 min read
Long story short, I was looking to push my shading/lighting chops a bit. I know Jay. I know my way around her design. Why not start with her?
To begin, I just split her in half. Oddly enough, you can see it in the navigator of the first image. That's just to more or less establish where the light's coming from. From there, I can further block in the basic areas of shadow, which includes a bit of erasing. Though it's mostly about putting stuff down. The major erasing and gradation will come later.
The first shadow pass, which sounds like a move in an RPG.
The darkest shadows overstep their bounds a bit here. What comes next is softening the transitions as they appear. Of course, certain shadows will remain sharp, but the majority of them will be softened. Not a bad look, though, but that's the cel-shader in me.
From here, I grabbed a grey between the white and the darker grey, though it's closer to the darker grey. And from there, I paint that in between the two values already on the canvas. This softens the shadows.
Her skin was simple enough to figure out. It was her hair that was the thing I was looking forward to figuring out. I didn't want to use some kind of brush to get it done quickly. Plus, I wanted to figure it out myself.
It was slooooow going, but I'd committed to it. After making a clear part as to where the three values were, I went in and just used the brush to make one stroke at a time, quick and curved strokes that mimic the curl pattern of kinky/coily hair. A convincing transition was the goal. To achieve this, I had to do some back-and-forth shading. There were three blocks of value I had to work amongst: white, grey, and dark grey.
From the white, I used strokes into the grey.
From the grey, I used strokes into the white and the dark grey.
From the dark grey, I used strokes into the grey.
The final greyscale.
After much smoothing and shading and touch ups and whatnot, I had a decent starting point. From here, I can lay down color and get to the coloring stage, a shocking revelation.
Well, that's it. God willing, I'll be uploading progress on this piece.
Thanks for reading.
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