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Painting Light And Shadow
Tutorial
By: Mattias Snygg
This is a tutorial on how to paint the Royal
Gala apple from Brazil. It's also a primer on light, and a little bit of
everything. It's hard to pick a suitable subject for a tutorial, and apples is
as good one as any.
I used Photoshop CS for this tutorial, but
the things discussed here apply to most other painting software. It's aimed
toward the more advanced Photoshop user, in this one I assume you know how
to get the software to do what you want. If you want to learn how to make
custom brushes, or something else of a technical nature, you should
look somewhere else (pressing F1 in Photoshop is a good start).
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1. Sketch
I grabbed an apple from the
fridge and put it on my desk. Scribble-scribble and voilą! A line
drawing.
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2. Blocking in rough
color
I created a new layer and
set the layer blending mode to "Multiply". Now I could to anything on
top of my drawing without risking losing the lines. I went to work on it
with lots of different brushes, keeping the real apple in the corner of
my eye. At this point I was only interested in the surface - no shadows
yet. I tried to replicate the complex and interesting shifts in color
that you can find on the skin of an apple, while still keeping it as
lose and free as possible.
To a certain degree this picture is
lying; there were lines going across everything when I did this. Only
when I was more or less satisfied with how the apple looked did I clean up
the areas around it with a flat beige.
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3. Adding shadow
Here's where the cheating begins. I added
yet another Multiply layer, on top of the first one. Then I picked a
grey/green color (the tiny blob in the lower right) and painted on top
of the apple.
Now all that nice detail from the initial
painting is preserved, and I could easily change the shape of the shadow
without altering the stuff behind it.
The shape of the shadow is just a rough
estimate - there weren't any hard edges to the shadow on the real
apple on my desk. At this point I just wanted to get an idea of the
lights and darks.
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| 4. Tweaking the darks
Here I started to play around with the
shadow layer. I used the eraser and other soft-edged brushes to smooth
out the edges of the shadow. Not everywhere though, there are still hard
edges up where the little stick goes in as well as on the table (or what
the hell that thing is sitting on).
Ah the benefits of working with layers!
Looking at the apple I noticed that the
right edge was almost as bright as the part that was in direct light
(the light bounced off the table and lit up a part that should have been
in the shadow). I took this into account and carefully brightened the
shadow.
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5. Background meets
foreground
Here's a real cheap
trick. You see what I did with the background in the upper left? It's
now darker than the lit face of the apple. And the background in the
lower right is noticeably brighter than the shadowy part of the apple.
This is an easy way to create a bit of
drama in a painting. The rule of thumb is to put a dark color next to a
lit surface, and a bright color next to a shadowy surface. The old
masters knew this, Rembrandt did it all the time, and it's still a very
convenient (if a little predictable) method to add intensity to what
you're doing.
The apple I painted didn't really look
anything like this, but in a hundred years who's gonna care?
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6. Highlights and we're
done!
Well, not quite...
Working with layers is all good and well, but there are significant
drawbacks.
You don't see the "handmade mark" in a
piece constructed with a lot of fancy effects. The trace of human will,
the putting-brush-to-canvas-making-a-mark part is vital to any work of
art, simply because we're human. I want to see the traces of someone's
deliberate attempt to describe something, the absolute attention it
takes to make a mark that really brings out the essence of... uh.. an
apple for example.
To that end I flattened the image and let
go of all the technical stuff. I tried to paint the apple, using
what I had done so far as a color sketch. Not as a blueprint, but as a
foundation for something else.
Not that it made much of a difference in
this case, but the ambition was there.
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Closing words
So is this method any good for doing other
things than fruit and academic exercises? I don't know. I've used it quite a
number of times for both personal and professional work, here's one example:
Guts
My recommendation is to use any means
necessary to get the ball rolling, while still keeping the image close and
personal. For each computer-generated effect, 3D rendered perspective grid, or adjustment layer you put yourself one step
further away from the painting. If finger-painting is the closest and most
personal means of applying paint to a canvas (short of using your genitalia,
but let's not go there) then using the computer already puts you at more than
an arm's length from what you're doing. Every thought and impulse you wish
to put into your work goes through a lot of filters; first the chunky,
insensitive and crude drawing-tablet, after that your painting software makes an
even cruder interpretation of what you want, and finally your monitor does
its own thing with showing you color and shape that's at a horribly low
resolution.
Add a bunch of fancy, prefabricated effects and
you'll soon find yourself working like a scientist rather than an artist.
Like working your canvas with the brush attached to a 2 meter pole. Or
looking at it through half a dozen sheets of glass.
Some of this can't be helped if you want to
use the computer for your art. Some of it is enormously enjoyable. But if
you try to keep these things in mind you can save yourself a lot of grief, and
hopefully create better art in the process.
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