Color & Light Illustration Masterclass: Drawing from Real Life

1. Introduction: Knowing how to use color and light in your artworks is one of the best skills to learn as an artist because it will help you to take your artworks from good to great. Hi, I'm Eva and I am artist, illustrator, and creator of Outside of Life Podcast, and YouTube show. Colors are definitely one of the main reasons I started to make art. They have been my passion ever since I remember. I'm excited to talk about color and light today because I want to help you communicate your stories and emotions with your audience. I was always mesmerized by how colors can influence how we feel about art, so I spend a lot of time learning about this topic and today I want to share this knowledge with you. This class is for everyone who is curious about colors and want to enhance their artworks with awesome color and light. Removing the fear of unknown, taking the guesswork out so you can be more confident in creating art and developing your own voice. If you like, before practicing, you can just watch the lessons to discover the concepts which you find the most interesting about colors. This class breaks the big topic of Color and Light into smaller parts to help you understand the main concepts so you can make your artworks appealing and beginning unbelievable. We will analyze paintings of Old Masters and look at how we can use this knowledge in developing our own. We will be looking at the examples of different types of light sources from real life and how they affect the colors of the objects we see around us. From natural diffuse light on an overcast day through popular sunlight and also window light, electric light, light at nighttime, and candlelight. We will also analyze the atmosphere and how it influences the color of the environment in landscapes and underwater. You will learn how to make the audience focus on what is important in your art works using color and light together with a contrast and composition. I will be sharing examples using the digital tools but you can also follow this class if you are a traditional artist because I will be focusing more on observation of the real world rather than the tools. You can pose anytime to take notes or re-watch parts that interest you the most. You can also download the line work with color palettes to practice the application would you learn along the way. I hope this class can give you confidence to share your unique experiences and stories with the world, so you can have an impact on other people with emotions in your art. If you break these and follow along with the lessons, please upload your art works I would love to see them. Don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare so you get notified when I release new classes. I am very excited to have you in the class so let's start creating awesome art works filled with color and light. [MUSIC] 2. Color Meaning & Symbolism: Let's start with the colors and the psychology of color. Why is color important to us and why do we talk about it at all? Colors play a very important role in our lives whether we realize it or not. They have the ability to affect our emotions and moods towards the environment, characters, and the objects in a way that few other things can. Color is a very important tool for communicating and can be used to indicate action, affect the mood, and cause reactions in people's mind. Some colors can actually raise your blood pressure, increase metabolism, and have been known to cause eye strain if you look at them for too long. With colors, you can set the mood, attract attention, or make a statement. You can use color to energize or calm down. By selecting the right color scheme, you can create the ambiance of elegance, warmth, or tranquility and you can [inaudible] an image of playful youthness. Color can be your most powerful design element if you learn to use it effectively. Colors are very important for many people around the world. Not only do colors influence emotion, but they also hold meaning in religion in various cultures. Color symbolism and color association has great importance during different culture observation. Depending on where you grew up or to what religion we belong, the colors have different meaning and symbolism. This connection with color is also influenced by our own feelings and can be very personal. To sum up, color meanings may have something to do with your past, your experiences, and your culture. Let's take yellow first. It is one of the brightest colors that human eye can see. Yellow color represents happiness, joy, freshness, confidence, or optimism. Although yellow is a bright and cheerful color, it can also quickly become dirty and unpleasant as it approaches the cold darker shades. On the other hand, red is often associated with energy, strength, passion, love, or drive. Purple has a connection with magic, mystery, inspiration, dreams, royalty, and luxury. Blue is one of the colors we associate with calmness and relax. Maybe because it is the color of the sky and clear water. It can mean balance, trust, honor, but also recovery. Green is a color of nature. It represents growth, money, fertility, and safety. The color green is a relaxing color that is pleasing to the eye and it is said to have healing powers. It also means independence, learning, and good fortune. Green can affect you in a positive way. It provides both mental and physical relaxation, like when you take a walk in a green forest. Colors can have many shades with many different meanings. In the middle of the wheel, the colors lose the power of saturation, and we can talk about meaning of white too. White is often associated with being pure, fresh, and good. You can imagine the fresh snow and the peaceful and the white and pure winter scene. In the movies, white often appears on actors who are being good, white horses, cowboys with white hats, and so on. The color white is usually associating with being almost heavenly. White is the color of the new starts and beginnings. On the other hand, too much white, especially in Western culture, can seem too cold, dangerous, isolated, and empty. White can also give a sense of sterility, distance, and lack of interest. Colors are very important for many people around the world. Not only do colors influence emotion, but they also hold meaning in religion in various cultures. Color symbolism and color association has a great importance during different culture observation. Depending on where you grew up or to what religion we belong, the colors have different meaning and symbolism. This connection with color is also influenced by our own feeling and can be very personal. To sum up, color meanings may have something to do with your past, your experiences, and your culture. While the white color is often used in many Western countries to represent cleanness, peace, purity, and innocence, in many Eastern cultures, it is seen a symbol of mourning and death. It usually means the end of life and beginning of another. We should always consider this variety when we create our concepts and our stories. What is the symbolism of colors in different backgrounds? What are we trying to communicate through our artworks by adding color to our characters and stories? To talk a bit more about culture differences, let's have a look at some of the other examples. If we asked children in Europe or in US to draw a sun, they would most probably reach for the yellow pencil. But in China or Japan, children most probably would draw the sun actually in the red tones. In Eastern cultures such as China, red is also a color of a good luck and it's also traditional color for weddings. Although times are changing and many Chinese brides today are dressed in white too. In Indian cultures, red color symbolizes purity, and it's often used for their wedding dresses too. Another example of the color meaning exercise is the sky. What color pops to your mind first when I mention the sky? Most probably you say blue, unless you live somewhere where it rains a lot and the sky is gray most of the time. Thinking about it though, there is more than just one option. Sky takes different color depending on the weather conditions, time of the day, or even seasons. In the first sketch example, we can have a blue sky with a sunny day. Then we can have a yellow, orange sky during sunset. Third example is also a sunset but in the later stages, just before the sun sets behind the horizon. It has purple red tones while sitting behind the horizon. Last sketch example has really green and dark tones which we can see during the night or during strange weather conditions. Light green colors can be observed also when the nordic lights are in the sky. You can actually create the whole color wheel with the colors of the sky. Don't rely on the first color which pops to your mind, and instead of that, try to observe, try to find unexpected colors, and get inspired by the nature. Okay, now let's go back to the color wheel and how do we use this information we just talked about and what it represents. 3. Color Schemes: Going back to childhood, the color wheel is one of the first things we learn about in a painting class, or when we start talking about colors. The color wheel, or a color circle is a basic tool for combining colors. The first round colored diagram was designed by Sir Isaac Newton. He was the first one to understand the rainbow. He refracted the white light with a transparent optical element with flat polished surface, resolving it into its component colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The color wheel is designed in a way that virtually any color combination you pic will look good together. Over the years, many variations of the basic design have been made. But the most common version is a wheel of 12 colors based on the red, yellow, blue color model. Let's have a look at some of the color groups. We have primary colors. The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. The three secondary colors, green, orange, and purple, are created by mixing two primary colors. Another six tertiary colors are created by mixing primary and secondary colors. Complementary color scheme is one of the most popular color schemes used. They sit opposite to each other on the color wheel, and the high contrast of these combination of the colors creates a vibrant look, especially when used at full saturation. This color scheme must be managed well, so he doesn't end up harsh. Complementary color schemes can be tricky and problematic to combine in large doses but they work well when you want something to stand out. As you can see, we have commonly used couples consisting of orange and blue, red and green, and yellow and purple. Another important concept are analogous colors. They are the ones which sit next to each other on the color wheel. They usually match well and create serene and comfortable designs. Analogous color schemes are often found in nature and are harmonious and pleasant to the eye. For example, purple, reddish, purple, blue, or light blue. Other version is split complementary color scheme. The split complementary color scheme is a variation of a complementary color scheme. In addition to the base color, it uses the two colors adjacent to the complementary one, which means that we use the second color next to the complementary from our color wheel palette. This color scheme has a strong visual contrast as a complementary color scheme, but has less tension. There is also triadic color scheme, where we use colors which are evenly spaced around the color wheel. You can move the arrows around the wheel and see which ones are evenly split. For example, yellow, purple, and green would be one of the triadic color schemes. We also have a monochromatic color scheme consisting from the shades of the same hue and using its shades, tones, and tints. Tints are achieved by adding white in shades and tones, gray or black. Monochromatic color schemes are strong sense of visual cohesion. It's often used in a different graphic communication designs, like posters, or when simplifying certain areas of complex artworks. The color wheel can be also divided into warm and cool colors. Warm colors are vivid and energetic and tend to advance in space, which means we tend to notice them first and gravitate towards them. Cool colors give an impression of calm and create soothing impression. White, black, and gray are considered to be neutral. Most of the time when people think about warm colors, we often hear orange and the red tones. When we are asked to name some cool tones, we mention blue, green, and maybe purple. This is what we are told as kids but the warm colors are not only red, yellow, and orange, and the cool colors are not only green and blue. This is what we are told as kids: The warm colors are only red, yellow, and orange, and the cool colors are green and blue, but is this really true? Maybe we were lied to, the whole childhood, so let's look at theory up close. Some of you might not know, but we have both warm and cool red. We also have warm and cool yellow. Then we also have cool blue and warm blue. What is more, from these combinations, you can create almost any color hue. How do we know which colors are warm and which are cool then? We have to always look at them in context next to each other. From these two circles you see on the screen which one is warm and a which one is cool? Or are they the same? Let's put this color in context. First, I'm going to use quiet, cool blue tone as a background. Now this color looks quite warm to me. What about if I use warm orange color in the background? Now the color looks quite cool, doesn't it? If you look at these colors next to each other, depending on the color we used for the background, they look different. They're the same color, but depending on the context, we perceive them differently. So always think about colors in relation to each other. Now let's look at some color blending. 4. Color Saturation: What do we know about the colors about until now? We talk about their symbolism. We also know something about the color schemes and the color wheel. Now, we can start creating some colored palettes using the color wheel. But if we would use only saturated colors from the color wheel, they would probably not work together well. Using only the saturated colors for the make our artworks not pleasant to look at. It may look unprofessional, or as a child learning to draw. Super saturated colors, if they are next to each other, they clash. They look like they're very loud or fighting, or they're just too bright and we don't have a place to rest our eye. Imaging there, shouting at each other, it just doesn't work well. But why is that? Because in real life, not all the colors are saturated. Let's talk about the hue and saturation for a second. Let's take one of the bright colors, or bright red, orange, for example. From here, I can start using the color picker and move towards lighter values on the color square into Photoshop, not wheel, to make these color less saturated by moving towards wide. In this way, you get much lighter version of the saturated red color from this transition. If we don't include color, we have only value. These means going from light to dark or dark to light, from color to white, we have saturations lie there. From white to black or light to dark, we have value. This is also called Brightness Slider in Photoshop. Let's try to use these knowledge now with using selected color, something very bright on opposite sides of the color wheel. We can take our bright orange, red, and cool green. How do we blend them together? Of course, as you saw, we use desaturated color tones, which are grays from this color in the middle. Gray tones help our eye to rest in between these really saturated tones and to help the saturated colors to pop. If we want to have one color really bright and saturated as a main part of our image, we will make our other colors less saturated. On this example, you can see these bright, orange, sun together with more muted and less saturated tones. What will happen if I use these really, bright orange for the sky and really, bright green for the grass? If you look at this example, it wouldn't work well together. As you see, if we would use only saturated colors, the sun wouldn't then pop as much and it will be also harsh for our eyes. Always think which colors are important for your image and use tones of grays together with saturated colors, you chose to make everything balanced. Now, let's go back to the saturation. How can we use it on more complicated images? Let me show you my folks drawing, which is still not very complicated, but beat more complex than our sunset image before. Here, I used most of the colors in quite desaturated tones over all. I wanted to keep the warms and cools in the sense that they have nice combination of orange and blue color scheme. I didn't use bright orange or bright blue from the color wheel, but rather, really, desaturated, muted tones of these colors. This is really, desaturated blue and really, desaturated yellow. When I was happy with this color palette, I started to use small shifts of the colors in the image, still staying in the blue tones on the left side of the folks in the shadow and I edit green tones and purple tones within the same value. Because, compared to the yellow on the other side, purple blue will look cooler. In this way, I kept the cooler tones next to each other in my value structure. We will talk about values and value structure in one of the following lessons. But this is how you can add variety to your images, even though you use a lot of desaturated colors. As a practice, I would like you to look at some of your favorite artworks or movie scenes and analyze what are the most saturated colors in them and what are the supporting tones or grays in those visuals? Copy few images for your practice and make sure you have enough contrast when choosing the color scheme or your color palette. Choose one or two colors to dominate the image and some less saturated colors as a support. At the end, you can add small hue shifts in the same valley range. Try to do this exercise by observing the color and not using the color picker. 5. Visual Communication: Let's discuss the visual language or communication. Colors are part of the non-verbal communication. They can speak for your images in quick interactions. As I explained in the previous lessons, they can instantly set a mood of a story moment, convey an emotion, involve a psychological reaction, or inspire people to take action. So what are the other tools which can help us guide our audience to our main story moment, except the color contrast. So let's talk about using contrast as a visual language. We want to communicate the main point of our images clearly and quickly. We can tell the whole story with just one picture. So first, let just draw cats because they are fun or better reign of cats. In the previous lesson, I mentioned that we would always think about what do we want to communicate with our images. What do the compositions in character say? Either character is good or bad. Which one is important for the story? What happened to them before this moment in time and what will happen after our story moment is over. If you look at our reign of cats, what do we know about them? They all look similar, and we don't know which one is the important character for the story and which one should we focus on. So how do we emphasize the most important part of the story other than with color? By using contrast. You probably guessed it. First, with light and dark values. This is usually the first option which comes to artist's mind. So let's change the value of one of the cats. Now we have one of the cats in focus, and immediately we know we should focus on these cat. It is standing out from the crowd after this change. What could be the story here? Maybe it's trying to hide, but it's not working out so well. Maybe it's somehow special, for example having magic powers. Or maybe it even wants to kill us. We don't know any of these for sure, but we know that this cat is somehow important for our story in this image now. So let's move on to the next example to see how we can bring the focus onto our characters and story part. The first idea for the contrast we mentioned was between light and dark. This is the value difference. Difference in brightness. Light and dark cat in this first example. If you look at the image, you notice right away that the intersection between the darkest and lightest area creates the strongest contrast. So what about playing with shapes? If we have a bunch of cats, which have a round shape, and one cat which is much taller, we will notice the cat with a different shape first, and we will immediately focus on it. Another example is playing with space. If we have a cat which has a lot of stuff happening around it with the negative space, also called empty space, where nothing is happening, it will bring the focus on that cat too. The white cat will stand out more if there is an empty space next to her, despite of the other parts of the image being quite busy with a lot of details like we have here. But another one, if we have a lots of cats in one tone, and we add a pattern to one of the cats, then this cat will stand out right away. We don't even have to make it bigger on change the composition. We are right away drawn to this character with the stripes. You can also use this technique on a character and their outfit depending on what part of the outfit you want the audience to focus on, you would create more pattern there. For example, you can have the pattern on the face of the character as a warrior or a part of the outfit which is near the face. It will help you bring the attention to the character's expression. For the next example, let's copy our white cat again, and let's make the other cats out of focus. Our main cat is sharp. On the others, we change the sharp edges to the soft or lost edges. By doing this, we are bringing the focus on the cat with a sharp and more defined edges. You can use this technique again on a character too. Like when the cameras are creating the out-of-focus on the face and the rest of the body is blurred out, plus the background is blurred out even more. So try to play with hard and soft edges and use the hard edges for the important parts of the image. Let's look at another example where we have bunch of cats, and they all face in one direction. You focus there, right? Now let's change the direction of one cat. It immediately creates a new focus point of the image. In this way, you can use also other elements like branches of the trees, rays of light, hands of the characters, anything which creates lines to lead the eye to our point of interest. As you have seen, strong black and white value contrast are not the only options for creating the focus. All of these will help you to complement your color choices and bring their focus to the part of the image which you want to. By combining all of these examples, or even just a few of these contrast examples, you can create super-strong images. Don't forget when you place the color on top of these black and white image and you want the colors to bring the focus, remember that the people usually gravitate towards warm colors. So make sure you use them right. As a practice, I would like you to look at some of the old black and white movies and get inspired with how they created layout, composition, and how they brought the focus to the characters. After you finish this exercise, sketch out some black and wide thumbnails which you can later use for your final images. 6. Visual Communication in Art: We usually learn a lot when analyzing examples from the masters'. So let's do that. In this example, this artist, Walter Everett creating amazing image of two characters as a main story moment. What do you think this image is about? What do we know about this moment? The focus is on the relationship of these two characters. We notice in the first seconds, we'll look at the image. Thanks to the digital revolution and social media, our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. Now we have less and less time to get attention of our audience. That's why we have to try to be really clear in communicating our ideas. Unless you want to hide something in the image. Remembering the contrast examples from our lesson before. How do we know we are supposed to look at these two characters? If we look at the same image in black and white, we can see the contrast of light and dark values right away. The light female phase and the dark outfit of the male character have very high contrast next to each other. What is more the light-colored outfit of a female next to the dark pot in the foreground is also quiet contrast for, those are the areas you will notice first. Also we can see the horizontal lines of the pillars, and the round shape of the pulse of the plants and the balcony too. We can also see previously mentioned negative space concept. The area where there is a lot of things happening like for example, you can see all those detailed leaves in the right side of the two-thirds of the image. In contrast to this, there is a lot of negative space around the face of the female character, as well as simplified values of her dress. Therefore, we have a place to rest our eyes. The artist also uses more finished areas in contrast with more sketchy areas. Sharp edges versus loser edges. The characters are more finished with sharp edges, and more losers strokes are used for the outside world. It is more out-of-focus, less finish, and blurred out there. As you can see, the artist uses as many tools to bring the focus to the characters as possible. He also used more warm tones for the characters and cool tones for the outside world. That helps a lot to bring the attention to the characters do. Now let's have a look at one of my paintings and how I implemented some of these techniques. I was looking into how I can use the shapes, direction in contrast of the colors, we'd simplified values in these underwater scene. As you can probably already tell from the previous example, I use directional lines of the light going towards the turtle, and the shape of the rock to frame in the character, and lead the eyes. The turtle is then in focus and the rocks in the foreground are out of focus. We also have a dark and light values contrast next to the turtle.I also use the red color flowers near the third goal, using the warm color to bring the focus to the character, because everything else is more or less green, to requires and yellow. To emphasize this cozy feel, I used curved round shapes and not very sharp rocks or plans which would look dangerous. Thinking about the composition will strengthen your focus of the image even more. Composition is another big topic to explore. So let's mention at least few things here too. I already talked about the leading lines to your focus of the image. Next thing is the rule of thirds, which means placing your characters or the main focus of your artwork in the two-thirds of the image. This will help balance out your artworks, and as already mentioned, the negative space is also important. Always try to have some areas where you can breath and relax your eyes when nothing is happening in the image, so it draws the attention to your main point. 7. Color and Emotions: If used effectively, the color theory is one of the most powerful tools artists can have in storytelling. It can transform your art into strong emotional experience for the audience by stimulating emotions like trust, worry, joy, or other strong emotions. You can connect with the souls of your audience. How does a yellow environment make you feel? Does the blue color calm and relax you? Artists have already for a long time understood how color can affect moods and emotions in an impactful way in storytelling. Let's look at some examples. How by using color, we can implement emotions, mood in a story. In this example, I got inspired by different hassle photographs combined with different ideas like candy shapes and underwater items and icons. I'm starting with the black and white composition. I'm not spending a lot of time to create the settings. I'm just drawing in the color on top of these value study in black and white just to get the first feel and emotions for the audience. The round shapes, like in this town design example, are usually sign of friendly atmosphere. We will also try to use different moods with different colors. But first idea, which comes to my mind with these nice round shapes, is a sunny day with classic blue sky and light greenery. Next one is another pleasant looking image, but now placed under water. I just added few bubbles with darker blue color. Another example is with more magical feel. Here I edit purple to create the sense of mystery. Now let's explore opposite to pleasant mood. Let's go more to scary setting with some red lights inside of the house. Dark tones and black itself absorb all the colors and there is absence of all the light. Dark colors hide things, light colors bring them back. You can also use them to reveal parts of your image. Very dark colors and black color is known to be intimidating, unfriendly, unapproachable because of the power it radiates. Dark tones are often used to portray something bad, evil, depressing, scary, and even death in western civilization. We also use these colors for hidden places and the unknown. Outside of the house, I use dark blue tones, and as a cherry on top, I edit strange green light to reveal part of the image. All of these creates uneasy emotion, but enough of black and darkness. Let's look at another example of the setting. Here we have a sunset field. It is still pleasant, but it has beat of desaturated tones. Therefore, it can be perceived also differently. You can use these colors as an unexpected twist to your story and turn it into something bad. Let's create another fantastical feel but this time without purple, because we already have that example. Here I created strange light from less saturated blue coming from the top. We also have these green light lengthened by the door. The sea green light usually evokes an uneasy feeling within us because we don't see these light so often in the nature. Next example, we are going underwater again, but this time with more pleasant, lighter blue tones which we can usually see when we just go snorkeling in shallow waters. It feels like a nice exploration setting in adventure with nothing bad happening. It is also not so deep, dark underwater as in the other example. Because I want the audience to feel more safe. Because deeper you go in the sea and the ocean there is less light accessing the areas and more dangerous unknown creatures too. Next example is less scary than the one with the red window light, but still evokes uneasy feeling with this green yellow lights, and it doesn't feel really cozy. The last example I chose is more foggy setting, which is strange too because you don't know what to expect because we don't usually see through the fog. We see only silhouettes. Then there is also a light in the house, which might mean someone is there, but we also don't know if this person is friendly or bad. Fog always creates a sense of mystery and keeps things to itself. Hidden from the rest of the world. To sum up, where you are creating a new art work, think about and decide what emotions and the mood you want to evoke in your audience. Because this can make or break your image. If you don't express the right feelings for the story, the audience will be confused and your artwork will be less appealing to them. It is also a good to explore color combinations in various reference pictures around you. Because you never know what can inspire you and you can discover something new which you are not thinking about before. In this image, I wanted to create fantasy cat which is inspired by links and a Jager. I started with a sketch and I had some references for animals while sketching. Obviously it's not a classic animal we can see in the wild. But we should still have a certain level of realism so we can relate to it. The idea is that the cat is resting on a tree like real-life cat. It has this strange antenna, antlers, really long tail with a furry ball at the end and big pores like limbs. I wasn't sure if I wanted to have this character to be friendly or unfriendly. By creating these thumbnails, I started thinking how much of the fantasy feel is it's supposed to be in the setting. Should it be really cozy and serine? Or it's more rainy day with a bad feeling or more fantasy feel setting. If you want to create more fantasy feeling, you can use unexpected colors for the nature, which will create this perception. For example, plants don't usually have a purple or blue leaves. They are usually green and have recognizable shapes. You can also keep the realism with using more realistic light. Here is also example with a rainy feeling with more realistic colors compared to the fantasy feeling colors next to it. Next example is the cat creature in more blue purple tones, which is less likely to be seen in the nature compared to these beige and white color of the cat on the other example. Last example are classic green tones for the nature and cozy feeling, but not too happy. Regarding the process, I tried to limit myself how much time I will spend on each thumbnail. If you already have a black and white values, it shouldn't take you more than 20 minutes or a half hour. Just to redefine these colors, if you sell like their color palette early on, it helps you finalize your image faster. Once I decided to go with this thumbnail and the colors, I started defining details and using more special brushes. To be even more efficient and flexible in adjustment, I separated parts of the image to a foreground, middle ground and background. 8. Color and Story: Next example, we have this girl reading a story to two small foxes with antlers. I didn't go so much overboard with fantastical feel on the foxes because the girl is quite realistic. We can still relate to the creatures because they look similar to foxes which we can see in the nature. It's easier for the audience to decode what it is. I have triangle shapes of the heads and the antlers so everything is pretty grounded in the real life with a little twist. I spent a bit more time on finalizing this color thumbnails than usual around hour I think. I wanted them to be more defined, but at the same time, I also wanted to play with the colors and see where it takes me. For this image, I chose the color palettes of a classic tones of the forest. Warm light going through the leaves, creating dabbled-light effect on the ground. I chose classic orange tones for the autumn colors and emphasize these hues with bright orangey red flowers. You can take this even further and have the orange leaves too. It's pretty autumn-filled forest and everything is really orange with warm light. But don't forget to keep the variety of colors as well. Like some green leaves or other details, so it doesn't look too orange. Otherwise, it would look less realistic and more like stylized monochromatic poster. Also notice that I have brighter tones where I want the audience to focus. Everything in the foreground is out of focus and is a bit darker. Light value tones are just around the characters in the middle. These three examples look pretty similar in mode. Let's look at the other example with morgue dark tones, but feel cozy and magical. There is a blue moonlight and the big round is more open with less trees in the background, so you would have an escape route for the characters if they need you. Everything feels more open and you don't have to feel trapped in deep dark forest. This creates cozy feeling. I also use bright pink for the flowers. They add more color to this evening scene so we don't end up with just blue monochromatic image. Because otherwise, as mentioned before, it could feel different than I intended. The highlights are cool and actually the flowers are also cool-red, opposed to the warm color of the flowers in the other image, so almost everything is more cool in these moonlight image. If you want to add more magical feel, just add few stars in the sky and how? Just paint white dots, which is pretty obvious. Another option is to draw fireflies. They can also help you to create different light source if you want to have more variety. Sometimes it is also really good to shift light sources so we don't have the same light angle in all the thumbnails. To make it more realistic and believable when painting fireflies or stars as dots, draw some of them smaller, some of them bigger with different distances among each other. Next example is with the light inside of the tree. You can see the light reflected in front of the foxes and we can also have a nice rim light on the character by just adding brighter colors on the edges of the silhouettes. The image I chose was the one in the daylight, autumn colors and cozy feeling. Later I spend more time on defining the girl's hair and adding more details to the book. Also, we have purple fluffy bowl things in the image, resembling birds for something more to delight to. The idea was that she was reading a story to the creatures. I also added small dots in the light to enhance the atmosphere. Because if you imagine a deep forest, the light usually comes in beams and there are little particles like dust flying around in the air. This is always really nice effect to add to your images. Here we have another example of a nice sunny day. There is a stone house with a mouse on top of it and some flowers on the rooftop. The sun is already quiet low to the horizon, so the rocks and ground is getting much warmer adding to life. We have blue shadows reflecting the blue light from the sky. We also have three birds as a characters evenly distributed around the picture to balance out the composition. With the small thumbnails, we are trying to see if the initial idea of the color palette is the right one or different one would look more better. Should it be nice, cozy setting, or is it the scary house? How do I find the right color palettes? To compare the color palettes better let me draw the colors next to the images so we can see it along the way. Well, I pick different color palette inspiration either from my trial pictures or I find nature photography online. Afterwards, I create the color palette from these colors on the photo. You can do this simply with the mosaic effect in Photoshop. In the scary version of the setting, the birds are actually vicious and not these nice, cute, fairy balls. We have these darker colors for the house, and with some lights, you can add a red glaring eyes to the birds too. They would look like they will eat the guavas in the house. Other exploration thumbnails are variations of cozy, calm, and mystical color pallet. In those cases, the mode is quiet similar, the final choice of the color palette is up to your preference or based on a brief from the client. You also need to think about what context your image will be used. Will it be on the white background? Will it be in the combination with other images and so on. To improve the composition of the image, I have to balance out some of the elements. Let's analyze the image. I have only these green tones and orange tones and the purple birds bring a bit different colored tone compared to the rest of the image. They stand out better. Another example element is the red flower which is bringing more attention to the house. The main image has a lot of unnecessary negative space, which doesn't really bring good attention to the main story moment, which is the house and the birds. Therefore, I decided to add more foreground plants and hanging plants to create more cozy feeling, to close off the space more. When the environment is more open, you feel too exposed and not cozy. We painted these hanging plants, but we will not keep them so sharp and defined. To create the illusion that they are closer to us, we will blur them, like they're out of focus and we are looking through them. The same approach is with the grass growing from the front. I blurred that one out too. Another reason for blurring out the grass, is that it looks more friendly when it's less sharp. To create even more depth in your image, you can make the foreground bird on the left top corner also more blurred out so it feels even closer to you. The other two birds will stay more in focus of the picture. It is sometimes nice to take a break from your image to see what you want to fix, maybe even the next day. Don't worry about taking breaks or coming back to the picture, you don't have to finish the picture in one go. To quickly adjust your images, you can resize elements of the paintings by using the filter and Liquify tool. That's why I really like digital media because you can quickly adjust elements. You could be working with the client and during the production, you might be asked to change things quickly and if you spend hours or week on something which doesn't exactly work how they imagined, you can adjust it quickly with the Liquify tool. It is also important to ask during the process, how many images are going to be really used and how many are just for exploration. The images which are just for exploration, you don't need to spend too much unnecessary time to create unimportant details and polish the image. Also to be able to quickly change parts of the image. I usually separate the main elements to foreground, middle ground, and background. You can also save your selections to load them later when you need them. In this way, you can, for example, move the house more to the right or more to the left, or adjust the position of the other characters quickly. This is very helpful when you are working within the fast-paced production and not purely by yourself. Because in the production, things can change very fast. 9. DEMO: Color and Story: Let's look at some more examples. Here is environment idea with a deer as a main character. I created a sketch for a layout and I also have a character coming to the edge of the ravine as she sees the deer across the broken bridge. The deer is little bit bigger than usual and you can see the scale with the three next to the deer. You can emphasize this even more with a small birds flying around the deer. It's fantastical, but still keeping a level of realism. Color palettes are inspired again from a real life, which I prepared beforehand. For example, bright sunny day is inspired from a hike to the mountains. Next example, is a sunset. These can be perceived as something nice, but also a bit bad because a lot of areas are in the darkness and you see only the silhouettes. It's up to you how you use sunsets in the Earth's stories. The other example, is with a fog and uneasy feeling in the gloomy setting with blurry silhouettes like we saw before with the castle example. Deer eyes are also glowing so he can look more scary. Then we also have a snow example. We still keep the ravine idea so you are not able to cross and meet the deer face to face. Here, I wanted to show you that also bright sunny day can create uneasy and they're not nice feeling compared to the first sunny day example. We have the trees without the leaves, which most of the time evoke bad feeling, almost look like the trees are dead. There is also no shelter to hide in this setting. What is more? You can also use colors to connect the characters within the story. In the first sunny day example, in the jungle, the character has red hair and the deer also have the same red flowers on top of the head. We use the same red color on the flowers, on the tree hanging above the character. This is how I connected them to show their part of the same story. Or in the snowy day example, the character has red hair too. Also there are some red flags or pieces of fabric on the wide deer's antlers. Thinking about the outfit color for the main character, is important to. What is the personality of your character? Is it good character? Bad character? Are they brave or shy? If you want to have a tough character, I would use the armor as I did in this example, or a black clothes to evoke power or strength. Black is usually very powerful color. That symbolizes also class, mystery, toughness, or elegance. You can support your color decision by the pose of the character. For example, ready to fight with the sword up or mesmerized by what she sees as sword down and more relaxed pose. Also, how did this character get here? Where is she coming from? What is she going to do? Does she have food? Because she doesn't have any backpack. Does she have a sidekick or other friends they came with her? You can create more to the story by adding more details like steps in the snow. Maybe we don't see them right now because they are standing there for a long time and the wind covered the steps. We can see some wind in their hair. If it is extremely windy, there can be parts of the snow flying around in the wind too. They can also be marks and scratches on the armor, maybe from a battle before, or marks on the tree with signs which way to go next or other clues you can hide in the image. Think about what happened before and what will happen after the story moment in time. 10. Types of Light Sources: Now let's talk about light sources. What type of light sources do we usually encounter around us in our daily life? I will talk about each of the light sources separately in the later stages of the course. But first, let's just list some of the light sources. Which one are those? First let's mention neutral diffused light or overcast light, which we mostly see when it's raining or when there are clouds in the sky. We also have a direct sunlight. This is commonly seen in the sunny days. We also have a window light, window light comes through the window inside of the room. Then there is a candle light and fire light. We also have a neon or electric light. Then the reflected light, which is not really a light source, but it appears a lot. Then we have the nighttime conditions and light sources, like previously mentioned, candle lights and artificial lights, like light bulbs. We also have a nice light effect like back light and rim light, and we also have a bio-luminescence when the light comes from within the plants in the nature. Let's go have a look at the light sources one-by-one. To compare the direct and diffused light, we use a symbol objects like these two balls. There is the core shadow on the ball, which is the shadow defining the shape of the object. Then we have a contact shadow, which is under the ball and the shadow which is casting on the ground. Let's compare what happens with these balls and their shadows during the sunny day and a cloudy day. First, let's talk about the direct Sunlight on a sunny day. With the example on the left, we have a direct Sunlight affecting the object more visibly with stronger contrast, there is a shadow which is casting on the ground and there is a contact shadow where the ball is touching the ground. The shadow on the left is very defined with sharp edges, and let's compare it with the neutral diffused light example on the right side. How do they differ? We have the Sun above the clouds. The light travels in a straight lines towards the clouds. When it gets to the clouds, it has the soft barrier and it starts bouncing in the different directions under the different angles. Therefore, there is no sharp defined shadow. Also the light weakens going through the clouds with every bounce. The shadow is still there, but it's more blurred out. The bounce light diffused around the bow influences the shadow. There is still visible contact shadow under the ball because the ball touches the ground and the bounce light doesn't get to these tight space, it becomes squeezed in there. Let's look at some real live example, so we can observe what we just looked at with these simple balls. 11. Neutral Diffused Light: First we will talk about neutral diffused light. The neutral diffused light happens when the skies are usually gray. Compared to the direct sunlight, the light here go through the clouds, which means it gets weaker, then it bounces off the surface to many different directions and it gets even weaker. We have these cute dog character. Her name is Bonnie and I was fed sitting here for my friend. She's a Hungarian vizsla and she's so cute. Shadow is not defined and not very noticeable right away because the light goes through the clouds as we mentioned, and then it bounces in all the directions. But we can still see the contact shadows where the objects are the closest to each other. For example, under the poles and under the ears of the dog, or patches of the grass. Here the objects are close to each other, so light doesn't get there very easily. Here you can notice that not everything is gray in neutral diffuse light setting. If you know these Bonnie is still brown and you can also see the green in the grass and badge in the sand. In this example, the background is quiet gray, but it's only because of the wide fog. The colors are still there. They are less saturated, but not gray. You have a bit of fog in the background and you can also see some atmospheric perspective where the objects are far away and are getting lighter. Don't forget that we still have shadows, even though we don't notice them right away. Let's look at another example, which is just me sitting on a cloudy day on the castle ruins. You can see there are always darker parts and lighter parts, and the shadows are not really strongly defined, but the colors are still there. Another example is tram in Portugal. In this example, I wanted to show you the shadow under the tram. It is very strong because the tram is a big object and it's close to the ground. You don't see the strong shadows near the humans because the cast shadows are too blurred out, you can usually see the shadows best under the vehicles on the cloudy days with a neutral diffused light. The shadow edges are not sharp and very defined because there is a light bouncing around and it gets to parts of the shadows on the edge. Until the light bounces more times to get under the tram, it loses its power. Every bounds, it gets weaker. The bouncing light is too weak to lighten up the part under the tram therefore, it's dark is bare. Next example is from, I believe, Grand Canyon in Spain, where you have this super cool, beautiful old stone houses, and we had really cloudy weather when we were there. Let's analyze this picture. Where do you look first at this picture? Do you see the shadows on the ground? What is happening? We have a light going through the clouds and bouncing off to different areas. It is bouncing of the ground and hitting all the objects around. It can't reach some areas so we also see some very dark parts of the image. For example, the light is too weak to bounce under the rooftop and under the balcony on the house. It casts a shadow, but it's very blurred out because the leaves led the light through so you can barely notice the shadow. Next example, we have a beach with quite heavy clouds in the background. In this example, I wanted to show you that the colors can be still quite warm and not so saturated despite of the clouds and diffused light. You can still see the beach in orange colors of the sand and the rocks and there are darker areas under some rocks where the light doesn't get so easily. Especially the areas of the rocks which have overhanging shape above the ground. They're blocking the light coming mainly from the top. Let's look at the colors next to each other and create some color pallets. We can still see the color of the warm wood on the sands and all the colors of the badge, orange rock formations, and the sand. They are all less saturated, warm tones. The signs colors like the reds and blues are still quite saturated compared to the rest of the environment, and especially when we compare it to the sky. This next example is from Denmark. We can see these bright green colors even though it's a cloudy day. The saturation is bit emphasized by the camera setting, but what is nice, you can see the colors and shapes of the object clearly without the contrast of the core shadows on the objects like on the sunny day. We can see these brown bonnie color and the green colors of the grass, and they are really bright, and the bright red color on the flag and on the red pants of the guy walking. The cast shadows under the characters are not really defined as on previous examples but they are still contact shadows visible. They are visible almost just like small dark lines where the characters touch the ground. Next example is from Portugal with my dog friend Chicka. This time the clouds were pretty heavy, but the sun was still shining through them as you can see on the picture. The colors are less saturated as they would be on a bright sunny day, but they still kept some of the color. The light rays are bouncing to all the direction, so we don't see the strong casts shadows, although we can still see the blurred dark circle around the ground under the dog. The darkest area of the shadow is where the pore is about to touch the ground. Then you can also see some darker areas where there are foot and shoe marks in the sand from people walking around. It is because the light doesn't bounce in these small type areas, strong enough to lighten up the shadows. The darkness of these areas is also influenced by the wetness of the sand. If the sand is dry, it has lighter colors, as you probably know. Of course, we can't forget to mention the most important part of this image and it is the white heart on the fur of Chicka's head. So cute. Next example is about observation. I'm painting on the beach. It was before the storm and it actually started to rain just after five minutes, I started sketching. I didn't have an umbrella, so I couldn't continue. But at least I was trying to remember and mark down what I saw around me. I saw pretty bright orange stones which appeared much brighter to me than we see on the picture. Before I left, I marked what I saw with just color tones next to my drawing. I also took a photo as a reference so you are able to fix the composition if you need to, and add details later in the image. I'm also not worrying about perspective or composition at this moment, because I can pick these parts later in the process. 12. Neutral Diffused Light in Art: A lot of old painters are just amazing to analyze and learn from. This image has less saturated colors to set the mood of a calm fishing time by the lake. You can definitely see the dark areas of the image as a contact shadows and soft cast shadows where the objects are close to each other. For example, where the rocks and the pile of wood are touching the ground. There is also dark water reflection. Compared to darker and lighter areas of these water reflection, darker areas are there because the water is reflecting the whole pile of wood and here we don't see the reflection from the sky where the water seem lighter. Next example is drawing and painting in the tall grass. The reds and greens are still pretty bright. Not as bright as in my photo example from before, but definitely not gray. Shadows are here but they are blurred out and they don't have sharp edges. We also have a darker areas where the light is blocked and the bounce light doesn't get there. Like under the painters vest or in the boat or under the characters where there are touching the ground in the grass. Another beautiful example, and this one is one of my favorites. You can see the darker areas under the cloth which she has over her head, also on some parts of the clothes and under the rooftop where the light from the sky is blocked. Light and dark parts are separated with subgradients and they are not sharp with defined edges. Also notice that there are more colors in the clothes, they are not only white. We have saddle orange, purple, beige, or saddle blue tones. Another example is a painting outside on a cloudy day, which can be really relaxing because it's not very hot. We have two characters dressed in white. Let's discuss these nice composition here too. We have two characters which are in the two-thirds of the canvas. Then we have these nice vertical lines of the fountain just above the male character leading your eyes towards these character. Another vertical line is created by the small rocky fence which the female is sitting on. We also have a simple background with more soft edges not to distract us from the characters in the focus. This all is visual language application, as I explained with a cat examples before. Here are the shadows defused too, blurred out, and you can see the darkest areas where the objects are close to each other again. Sometimes it is easier to half-close your eyes when you want to analyze and observe the simplification. If you half-close your eyes, you can see the darkest areas are in the forest helping the characters in the white to stand out. There are more darker areas where the other objects are close to each other. There is also a big variety of colors on the stone wall here. As you can see, a lot of use of the color on the stone from dark brown to blue and orange tones. Also on the outfit, you can see the beige, blue and white. To add some of the visual interest, we also have a green overgrown molds around the stone. From that, we can conclude that the stone is old. So there's bit more of a storytelling here too. As a practice, try to observe neutral light and the colors of the objects. Find some of your favorite movie scenes or artworks in neutral diffused light and study them in detail. After analyzing some of these artworks, sketch out some examples of neutral diffuse light just as thumbnails for you to practice different types of the shadow and colors in the neutral diffused light setting. 13. Direct Sunlight: Now let's talk about direct sunlight, which is one of the first light sources people tend to study because we can see the shadows and form easier. It is also the time where we like to go out most to enjoy ourselves. Painting outside is also pleasant during this time. You can see a lot of plain air studies during this direct sunlight on social media. In our first example, we have a happy cow in the mountains, it is super cute, curious, and also fluffy. We see her shadow very clearly, and also the core shadows on her body. We see also other shadows from us walking towards the cow. We are distracting the composition a bit. There are shadows on the mountains in the background too, which are from the clouds above. Everything else is more or less bright green. You can see some of the green reflected in the water behind the cow. Plus we also see the blue from the sky reflected in the lake. The rest of the lake is more brown because they are probably Earth and there are sediments floating in the lake too. The next example is from Portugal, and you can see people sitting on the benches in the main square. We have sharp define shadows on the light marble tiles from the people and the ice creams tent. We can see the colors and shape of the objects very clearly with a sharp definition of the dark and light areas. We don't have any big buildings over the main squares, so there is not so much shadow and therefore, directness on the square and the square itself it's really bright. You can almost imagine it glowing if you paint it because there is a lot of light reflected from these light surface, although wide surface in the direct sunlight feels very bright to our eyes. So we can play with this in our paintings and adding some blur will make it feel like it glows. The sky is very blue without clouds. Notice that there is a gradient in the sky too, light at the horizon to darker colors at the top. It is not one tone of the blue color in the background. These was very revolutionary when I realize these for the first time. Another example is with the sun closer to the horizon. It is lighter in the afternoon and the sun creates a strong shadow on the wall. We also have a lot of seagulls flying around. We can see very different shadows from them on the ground. You can see also the gradients of color blue in the sky again. All the objects have very defined core shadows where we see which part of the object is in the light and which is in the shadow. We can also distinguish the colors of the objects very clearly. Let's look at another example. In this next example of a direct sunlight, we have few clouds and you can see the gradient from dark to light in the sky again. There is a variety of colors in the ocean too, from the foam near to the coast, which is almost white, through greenish brown close to the coast, to dark green in the background. If we look at the sand, we can see the darker area where the sand is wet from the water. The wet area is also lighter and a little bit blue in some parts because it's also reflecting the sky. The cliffs and the rocks are orange because they have a desert sand texture. There is a lot of value variety in these rocks too. There are very dark areas, very light. Some are more saturated, little shifts of yellow, some brown, some less saturated orange. Don't forget the variety in nature, like the imperfections like crags on the rocks, because the world around us is not perfect. More imperfections you can create, the more realistic your environments, surfaces, and the characters will be. Also notice the variety in the clouds. As you can see, they don't have the same shape or size. Some of them are more transparent and some are more solid white or in more gray tones. Because they are away from the sun, they're lighter on top and on one side closer to the sun, and darker at the bottom in the side away from the sun. If you would look at the clouds against the sun, they will be darker in the middle and light on the edges. Observe in which part of the sky the clouds are because the light and shadow of those objects will be in the different places, and they will also appear to have a different color. Here is another example. This one is from the Colmar City in France, and it was apparently used as one of the references for a Beauty and the Beast movie because of the super sweet looking houses. They just look like from a fairy tale. It is one of my favorite places in Europe to sketch and draw. It can be really too risky sometimes, but you can always find a nice quiet place to relax and sketch the colorful houses. The sun is very high up in this image and it's creating these strong casts shadows from the houses. If the buildings were taller and therefore far away from the ground, the edges of these casts shadows would become a bit more blurry on the edges. But don't forget, this happens only on the edges and not the whole shadows like on the overcast day. Another example is again, picture of me, and my excuse is that it's always easy to take a picture of yourself as a reference because then I don't have to look at stock photos for edges. Anyways, notice the bright colors of the plants on the flower bush above me. There is a big difference and quiet sharp transition between the light and dark areas of this object, compared to the neutral diffused light in soft transitions from shadow to live in those conditions. Here the darkest parts are in the archway and also in my shadow. Notice the variety of a value tones in the shadow too. We have a surface with different colors of the tiles. On the light tiles, the shadows look differently. Moreover, the shadow is lighter in the middle, where it's more illuminated from the light bounced around. Let's create a color palette from this example next to this image. Maybe we can use it in the concepts in the future. With a big visual library of a lot of different color combinations in your mind, it will be easier for you to imagine new scenarios for your paintings. Now let's look at snow example. Here you can see a snow photo I took when we went cross-country skiing. Snow is rarely reflective. It diffuses reflection, so the light's tend to be reflected in all directions. The light bounces strongly and you can even get pan faster when the snow is around because the light reflects so much. Everything becomes much more bright on a sunny day with the snow. If you would add characters to the scenes, they should have a sunglasses or they would have half-closed eyes because they cannot see well against all these light. The shadow is really blue and very visible on the picture because we see the light from the sky in the shadow and the blue light from the sky is weaker than the sunshine. You can again see these blue gradient on the background on the sky behind from dark to light. These blue gradient on the background will help your images to bring more variety and realism to your artworks. Also, if you want the character to stand out from these environment, you can use red color like we have in this example. Maybe even with a red cape and the creature in the background, and you immediately have a story. Let's look at another example with the direct sunlight. It's me again with these two cute doggies. I wanted to show you the value difference in the shadows in this picture. Because of a direct sunlight, we again have shadows with very defined edge and all the objects in this picture have big contrast from the areas exposed to light to areas in the shadow. There is no very strong glide reflection in the shadow in this picture example. But we still have differences in the darker areas and lighter areas in those shadows. Notice that there is a shadow under the dog's head, which is casted on the dog's body. It is lighter compared to the shadow which is on the ground where I'm sitting. That area is where the light is blocked completely and the light is not reflected there either. Always compare the differences in the shadows on your images. They don't have to look the same everywhere. 14. Direct Sunlight in Art: Let's look at another example. So in this example, I will show you how I sketch in practice from the photo reference or if I am on location. We have a windmill on the Canary Islands, which is fully in a direct sunlight. It is very bright object. We don't see the cast shadow on the ground very clearly because it's blocked by other objects. The core shadow is a salt gradient because the wind wheel is around. The side of the windmill, on the right is in the light, and we can see it as almost warm bride live. The shadow on the left side of the windmill appears just dark on the photo. I will add some blue color to emphasize the contrast compared to the warm sunlight. There'll be also blue reflected light from the sky, which we can see as a blue thin in the shadow side. I also added some green color in the lower part of the shadow, and these will represent reflected light from the characters below. I chose this image because it's a very bright sunny day and we can see the reflected light better on this wide surface as for example, on this object. We have a dark shadow under the roof, where the roof is blocking the sunlight and here will be one of the darkest places on this painting. We also have some white clouds in the sky behind the windmill. So it is not completely clear blue sky they is. We don't see the gradient of the blue in the background compared to the previous examples. The green color of the hill behind the lighthouse is quite light and not very saturated. It is because the type of greenery is not very bright green and also because the mountain is affected by atmospheric perspective. Because it's not so close to us and it gets lighter and less saturated. The cactus in the foreground is more saturated and there are many types of greens in the nature. Then it's always nice to bring variety of the colors and variety of the plants their images. These cactus color has different green color than the grass on the hill behind the windmill and also the cactus is closer to us. We've see the saturation better. I remember seeing it more saturated than we see on this photo reference. Therefore, when you paint it, you can make it even more saturated that is in on the photo. When I wanted to create more shadows within the cactus area, I selected the same green, which are used for the base of the cactus and then I chose the darker and more saturated green. I didn't go for desaturated green because I didn't want the shadows to feel too muddy, desaturated and have the shadows feel cool and more blue. When you feel more comfortable, you can create more color shifts in the same value areas, like adding random hues of color within this same darker value tones. For example, in the shadow dark area, you can use dark blue, dark purple, and just experiment when you are happy with your other basic colors and value composition. If you want to keep realistic light, you might not want to go for very bright colors in the shadows, because shadows should always stay darker than the areas of the objects exposed to life. After being happy with my basic colors of the windmill, I added more saturated colors to the transition in the areas where shadows changes to like. I also added more saturated red on the rooftop where the shadows connects with the light plus more warm light on the top of the roof. It all depends on your artistic choices and preferences, how much saturation you want to add to these shadow and light transitions. I always really like to add the more saturated and random brush strokes to the transitions where the light meets the shadow. It makes my images more vibrant, which I like. Other saturation and vibrancy can be created by reflected light. We'll get more into examples and details and analyzing this in the next lesson. But I will point it out here too, so you can see as many examples as possible. Like I mentioned once before, try observing this image with half-closed eyes and notice the darkest and lightest areas of the image. It needs practice. If it's hard for you to notice, bring your image to Photoshop or other digital software and use levels or curves to simplify your reference image to see the simplification and grouping of values of the shapes in the complex environments around us. At the end, I added the windmill arms, and I didn't painted them before as I wanted to focus on the color of the base of the windmill. The details at the end adds to the story you want to create later on. The image can be bit boring right now because nothing is happening in there. Let's add some imagination to it. You can maybe add the sign, like keep out or air the donkey working in the windmill. You can maybe create a window so you can see inside. You can place a bird or a cap on the rooftop. You can actually paint the balcony, which I didn't include. If you paint this, don't forget to add a shadow under the balcony. Maybe we can put a character on a balcony, or maybe this character is escaping from the windmill, or maybe is waving on the other character standing by the wind mill. This character can be looking at the map because it doesn't know where to go. Or you can create a character with a stick as a stick salesmen adventures. You can actually check out the website where people collect adventures of a traveling stick men. Because it's really funny how many people are adding just one character with a stick to bring the story to life and create a sense of scale. By just adding one character, you already have some story and people will be more drawn to your image compared to just an environment. Let's look at some master's work. In this first example, you can see this beautifully illuminated purple areas, despite being in the shadow. The painter decided to create the shadows in those beautiful purple tones to emphasize the reflected color of the sky. It is more skylised, but there is still a relationship between light and dark values. We'll most probably not see such a bright purple shadows in the real life, but they are still close to reality with the contrast between these dark and light values. Always watch out for these. Even illuminated and highly saturated shadows should be darker than the areas exposed to light to keep it real. Next example is a scene on the beach where we have illuminated shadow again. But because the surface is more sandy in the artist's choice was to go for more darker tones or warmer colors, the shadows are not blue, as in the previous example. Shadows don't always have to be blue, even though you can see it in many artworks nowadays. The shadow has a strong contrast next to the character. The shadow is part of the composition here, leading your eye from the lower left corner directly towards the 2 characters. There is this beautiful white outfit, with the transparency on her leg where we see her flesh through the white fabric. Also notice that the white dress is not only one color. It has a lot of blue shifts of color and also some yellow reflections due. It is visible, for example, in the area near the head of the male character. The reflected light is only visible in the shadow areas because it is weaker than a sunlight. Also look at the difference in color of the skin on the arm and on the leg visible through the fabric. To portray the transparency of the fabric, we use the color of the skin from the rest of the body, mix with the color of the fabric to achieve these desired effect. Let's look at another example. Here we have wet sand from the ocean and shadows are pretty green. The artistic choices here are live green hues in contrast with a white dress of the characters. Plus notice the darker tones on the edges of the shadows and the lighter tones in the middle of the shadows, as I showed you on one of my photos. The umbrellas are also casting a shadow onto the dress. The shadows here are pretty greenish too to keep the consistency in the whole image. On one side, they are less saturated and they look more gray, but next to the warm light, they look more greenish and cold. We also have some reflected light in the area of the umbrella shadow, which is more purple and blue, bringing more variety of the colors to the shadows. 15. Window Light: The next slide source which we will talk about is a window light. We have a lot of stories and concept art happening indoors, this is one of the important light types to discuss too. We will be able to realistically convey as many stories settings in your art as possible. There are few types of window light. The one where the sun is directly shining to the room, like south-facing window when everything is very bright and warm, and we can see clear shapes of the light form on the object in the room and also clearly defined shadows. Then there is a light from a sun setting down, which makes the room and objects in the room very orange and the last one is not so obvious one because many times we don't notice it or study it because it's not very strong. It is a light from the north-facing window and the light doesn't shine directly through the window, but the window still provides brightness to the room like here in this example. In this case, the light coming through the room appears to be cold and blue and close to the white colors. It also creates other green effects in color tones on the ground and on the ceiling, especially in wide rooms. Try to observe these when you are in a wide room with a window on the side. The light is behaving similarly to a diffused light with the soft blurred out shadows, with the direction influenced by the position of the window. Now we are in Austria, in Schoenbrunn Palace and you can see that we have bright light coming through the window. There light doesn't shine directly through the window though. It's bright, sunny day outside but the area of our window is in the shadow. Therefore, the light coming into the room is behaving like if it was coming from a north-facing window and it has blue tones. We can also see the light reflected on the floor because the floor has very smooth polish surface. The light from the window is affecting the walls of the room on the right and as you can see, they are lighter than the rest of the room. Let's look at another example. Here we have a museum with a couple of statues. We have a window light on the right, and we also have a warm artificial light on the left side. So we have two light sources effecting the state use. Window light and soft artificial lamp light. The window light looks even more blue next to these warm light indoors. The floor is again very smooth and polished, so the light is clearly reflected on it more to. Similar like it would be if the floor was wet. Notice the shadow of the statue too, in this example, the light from the window is very strong and bright and it is creating solids shadow of the statue. The light from the lamps is weaker and it doesn't create strong shadow from the statue on the other side. This statue is blocking the light from the window, and therefore, we can notice the warm light from the lamp on the left shadow. The lamp is affecting all the objects around it, but because it's overpowered by the window light, here it appears more. So the shadow area is where the window light can't get to, and therefore the shadow is orange. Let me sketch this out for you so you can remember it better. You have the bluish looking window light from the right, creating these blue highlights on the right side of the statue. Then we have the weaker artificial orange light from the lamp on the left, also affecting the highlights of the statue from the left. If these would be reflected light, it would not create highlights and it will be visible only in the shadows. The next example is a traditional wedding in Japan, and we were lucky enough to see it. We have this beautiful Japanese girl in the foreground, and she's wearing light colored outfit. She is in the shadow of the roof of the temple where we are standing and it is very bright day outside. Here you can see the window light combined with the reflected light on the beautiful light-colored outfit. Let's get to the character on the side in simple shapes, so we can compare the colors for the study. Here I'm sketching using the selection tool and selecting shapes. You can change the edge of the selection tool from hard to soft with a feather like setting on the top bar in photo-shop. For example, to 10 or 30 to have very soft selection edges. You don't have to have only hard edges with the selection tool. When you have the selection tool set with the soft edges, you can also easily change colors in the parts of your image in the later stages of painting. For example after you select the area what you want to change, you can go to image adjustments and replace color, or you can just do any other adjustments you want to try in your paintings. First I paint white outfit and the dark hair. We can also see bluish looking light from the window on the left and her face is quite dark because it's in the shadow, compared to the color of the skin on her neck, which is much lighter. Then we also have reflected red light in the shadow on her shoulder bouncing from the red ceiling and all of these is combined with the yellow light from the yellow neon lamp, which is in the background. She also has a pink decoration in her hair, which is affecting the dress too because as we already mentioned, that dress is white and also it has slightly reflective material, so we can see the reflections quite well. Also notice the blue-looking light from the window on her hair in the highlight area. We might see this even more if her hair color was different. There is also bright glossy reflection on the floor coming from the other window opposite to us in the background of the image. You can see the blue color there on the tablecloth too caused by the window light and there is also more yellow color on the other table in the background there affected by the yellow neon lamp. To sum up, we have blue looking window light from the left outside on this image and the blue light from the window in the background too. We also have red reflected light on her shoulder in the shadow and the yellow neon light creating almost like a highlight from a lamp above in the background. 16. Reflected Light: Our image from the wedding in Japan is a good transition from the window light to reflect the light. Because it includes both examples as we already saw a bit. This reflected light is bouncing from the red ceiling to the shadows area of your shoulder. In order to create the illusion of the three dimensionally in your artworks you want to bring as managerialism as possible. You can do it by using glide, form, and color, and the reflected light is a big part of it. We already spoke about the core shadow defining the shape and the form of the object. The most commonly seen reflected light in many artworks is in connection with direct warm sunlight. In this case there is a cool core shadow and the reflected light is also warm and bright. But there are other types of the colors of reflected light, you can use to make color and live more convincing and vibrant. By simply modifying the color of the shaded area, you suggest the effect of the reflected light, a colored light that bounces back into the shaded area and modifies its color. With practice, you will be able to observe these subtle color changes and reproduce or even exaggerate them to create more believable and vibrant images. Let's look at how reflected light effects a shadow, because it can help you bring really nice vibrancy and realism to your paintings. Let me write on the top reflected light on top of the screen. We have it there to remind us what we are talking about. Let's have a look at some more examples and sketches. Here are a couple more examples from beautiful Japan, and it's really nice and sunny day. we are at one of the temples with amazing architecture. There is this bright red rooftop from where the lines reflect and bounces beg, indoors. As I mentioned before, the light coming from outside is reflected and bouncing from red roof, the red floor, and it's weaker than a sunlight, so we can only see it in the shadow areas of the object. Many times we would see the reflected light only on one side of the object. But in this case we have a bride red roof and a bright red floor too. So therefore we can see the light from outside bouncing from the red rooftop as well as the red floor. We can see the reflected on more areas on these objects there. I think they are Haystacks and you can see the red light from right, from left, also from the top and from some bottom areas, but only in the shadow areas of those objects. The actual color of these round objects is brown and beige, as you can see in the middle parts of these Haystacks, let's call them Haystacks. Tried to notice the subtle differences of color on top of these objects. From beige, too dark beige, brown, and in the shadows of these objects, they are turning into red stones, where relied, reflect into the shadows. Because of this reflected light, almost everything in this image feels more read, except some small parts where their live heeds directly the areas. We can also see the light blue area where the light comes from the window. The light from the window appears cooler compared to these reddish environment. Therefore, it looks more blue than white. The next example is bright sunny day. We do streets in Italian, Cecily. We have two pictures of a narrow streets with buildings. Both pictures were taken at the same sunny afternoon and the same weather condition, but they are look different. One picture looks warmer than the other one. So why is that? As you probably guessed, it's because the reflected light and all of this is because some of the buildings on the left are painted with a yellow, orange paint. When the light hits those orange walls and bounces away from the wall, it takes some of the color we did and distributes it in the shadow on the other side of these narrow street too. These makes the house in the shadow more illuminated and brighter orange compared to the example on the right side where the houses are illuminated from the light. But the reflected light is cooler because of the White House on the left from which the light bounces off. The illumination of your shadows really depends on the color of the objects from which the light bounces off. If you wanted to paint the image on the right and have more eliminated shadows, but still stay within the cool tones of the wide building. You could pain some of the brighter blue tones, green or purple tones. Your painting would be more expressive in the shadow. If you want to make the left image as a painting with bright colors, you could add some of saturated oranges and maybe even some warm purpose do. But always remember that the saturated colors in those shadows should be less bright than the colors in the areas exposed to light, so you keep your painting realistic. Here is another example, we also have a reflected light in between these calmer, beautiful houses. The area in between the houses is super bright because as you can see, the light is bouncing off of the orange house and it's reflecting into the shadow on the yellow house next to it. This can be noticed often in the narrow streets in many old villages with the beautiful colorful houses. In the next example, we can see the nice summer day after the storm. We can still see some of the dark blue and gray clouds behind the house there too. We have a bright orange house. The color seems even brighter when you have them next to the dark loud from the storm. The sun is lightening up the house and the light bounces of this area and fix the shadow under the rooftop. You can see this effect usually stronger and more visibly on the buildings which are white. We can also look at the other side of the house where we can see the reflection in the shadow doom. Here we can also notice little bit of green reflection from the trees nearby too. Let's paint a simplified house shapes so we understand better how the library flight. Now let me draw a simple shape of the house to show you an example for the reflected light on the wide buildings as we just talked about. We can use the selection tool to sketch or we can use brush and affiliate with color. We have a light source on the top right corner, and therefore we will have a shadow under the roof and the cast shadow on the ground, on the left. The ground in this example is a semi reflective surface. If we, for example, had a water surface, this will be a highly reflective surface and it would reflect the light much more. We can see the reflected light on the left side on the house. It has a weak influence there because this area is still affected by the sunlight too. The reflected blue light is more visible in the shadow under the roof because the sunlight doesn't get to it. The shadow is dark as here because the roof is blocking the sunlight and the bounce light is too weak to bounce up there. It is easier for the light to bounce onto the cast shadow on the ground or on the left side of the house we mentioned before. Therefore, the cast shadow is lighter than the shadow under the roof. The next important shadow we shouldn't forget is a contact shadow. This shadow is where the house is touching the ground because otherwise the house would look like it's flying. Maybe sometimes we do want that. But in this case, we want the house to be on the floor. As we saw in the previous example, like can't get in these tight area and therefore, it needs to be very dark. 17. DEMO: Reflected Light: The next example of what we will paint the reflected light is hedgehog on the grass, and why? Because hedgehogs are really cute and the reflected light is visible because they have lied beige belly. We can see the color of the reflected light, quiet well here on the fur too, I will start with the silhouette of the Hedgehog and then feel the selected area with the basic colors without the reflected light. I have my real life hedgehog pictures on the other screen as a reference, do you see the classic colors and anatomy? I'm using only simple brush on the whole sketch, so I don't get distracted with a big selection of brushes and I can focus more on the color distribution on the animal. I'm keeping the belly of the Hedgehog light with the darker beige in the shadow area because we establish the light source on the top right corner. The highlights are on the back of the hedgehog, where the light is starting first and they are warm. I will keep my light source wide warm because I want to have these green reflected light which will be contrasting nicely with a warm light. I chose a green saturated color for the grass, and here I have a nice brush for the grass, even though I said I'm not using any fancy brushes at this moment. This grass brush is creating different soft shapes and brushstrokes. I created it by painting oval shape and adjusting the spacing in size variety in a brush setting. As you can see, the size of the branch is changing depending on how hard I press with a pen. Now I define some of the phase features to have a better contrast on the face. I also wanted to make this hedgehog more cute, so I make the nose and the eyes bigger and I will add more strong reflections to the eyes and the nose too. I can adjust part of the image very quickly with a liquify filter and free transform tool. If you don't like your adjustments, you can always go back in the history. I always set it to higher number of steps so you can go back in history quite easily. I have it set now to 250, and this means your computer needs to be strong enough to remember the steps in the paintings. Some computers are too weak and can keep only like 25 history steps back. Try different settings and see how many history steps back you can have and how much you can play with the progress of the image. Later I edges the perspective and the angle of the face, so the nose of the hedgehogs look longer. From this point, I can start painting some of the reflected light, which is green on the belly of the hedgehog while still tweaking the face features along the way if I feel like they need the change so I don't have to be logged, now I cannot change anything anymore. I start from the brown tones, from the shadows and then keep adding step-by-step green tones there. I also needed to paint some of the shadow from the hedgehog he's casting on the grass under him, and this area is just darker green. As a next step, I'm adding some more details to the spikes on his head and on his back, because in real life there is more variety in colors in those areas. They're darker in the areas where they're growing out, and also the gaps in between them. At the ends, the spikes are bit lighter and these might be hard to see where the light and shadow is because we don't have a solid surface but rather sharp areas of the spikes, and in addition, there is also a variety of spikes colors without any light. As you can see, I didn't paint every spike, but it's just the suggestions of this type of a surface. The same would happen if you want to paint brick wall and simplify the painting. You don't have to paint every brick to suggest that this is a brick wall. I also added some pink color to the face under his mouth and around the eyes darker because there are some shadows there too. As a practice, I would like you to find some pictures in the real life experiences where you can observe reflected light. You can also do the White House object experiment by yourself. By placing the object under the direct sunlight on a surface with colors you can observe in the reflected light better. You can also try the same object with a different color surfaces. You can also observe the reflected light on your skin when you are near by water. Also you can see beautifully, for example, on a golden retriever swimming or jumping in a pool. Because the water is highly reflective surface and the reflex strongly on the light for the dog. Sketch some simple thumbnails where you include different colors of reflected light in the shadows. To sum up the reflected light, we have a light source like a direct sunlight, and when the light bounces off the objects, it takes the color from the object and brings it back in weaker version to the objects around. We see it only in the shadows because it's weaker than a direct sunlight. The reflected light will help you eliminate your shadows and make your drawings more vibrant and realistic. 18. Night Light: The next we will look at lights at night and scenarios connected with it. For example, dusk, nightfall, getting dark and pitch-black night. The light behaves differently in each scenario. First, let's look at some examples of the photos from our travels. The first picture on the left is just after sunset when it's getting dark and we have some street lights which are creating these orange colors in the environment. The sky is still quiet, light blue, and we see some orange tones in the background from the sunset on all the objects affected by the sun. During the sunset, objects we see against the sun are getting darker. We can see the silhouette of the palms, which are pretty dark already. Then we can see this orange light on the pavement from the lamp on the left. Other areas out of reach of these light from the lamp look more blue compared to the orange-colored light here. The next example is again in Japan right after sunset and there are these boats on the river, the mountains in the background, and it's getting darker. The sun is behind the hill, so it is not influencing the environment that much, with warm tones of the sunset is, and the other example. Everything looks quite cool and the colors are more desaturated and blue. To train our observation of the dark and light color values and simplification of the complex environment. We can have close our eyes and try to see the darkest areas of the image. Notice that the darkest areas are on the both sides and the wooden area by the water and also next to the buildings. We can look at it also at the black and white setting to better see the dark and light values. The next example is also from Japan during the same day, but a bit later in the night. We are near the river and it's getting darker. The tones are getting more and more blue and I wanted to show you these in comparison with the orange feel of the night colors in Italy on the other example, the image from the Italy on the right is much lighter during the night. The sky is really dark compared to the street. So the orange lights from the lamps on the streets are overpowering the overall light of the image. We don't see the sky color anymore. Everything looks more and more orange over all there. When we look at these two examples on both we have artificial lights in form of lamps, but in the picture from Japan, the lights are far away so we don't see the influence of the orange light this strongly as on the image on the right side. Now let's look at the combination of the orange and blue colors in one night scene. The night sky here is pretty blue with a gradient from dark to light. Then we have the orange light sources from the lamps and the orange color from the light is affecting the building and the tables around. If you want to place a character in the scene, you would put it somewhere near the orange warm light so we know this is right the way. So if you want to paint a light from the lamp and you want to have it feel like it's glowing, don't forget to add blurry edges around these light sources so it really looks like its own and it's glowing. Here you also see a big difference from the center of the light, which is almost white to darker orange on the edges. 19. Night Light in Art: Now, let's have a look at some examples from the old masters and how they painted night scenes. As we saw from the photos, the light from the man-made areas look more orange and everything else looks more blue. But why do we actually see the colors of the light blue? Is the moon light blue, apparently not. But because the moonlight is so weak, we can perceive the colors differently compared to during the day. A lot of people see the night colors as blue or in a greenish tones. Here, you can see few examples during the night with a nice moonlight setting and pretty bright moon. When you paint moon in the night scene, don't forget to edit the textures on the moon surface. It also influences the surroundings. If you don't paint the light from the moon on the objects that are in your painting like for example, in the clouds, the moon will look like pasted into the artwork. In the first image, the moon is evenly reflected on the water to emphasize the brightness of that light. In the second image, the moonlight is reflected on the clouds and in the third image, the moon is behind the fog and the clouds. We have three different color scenes for the night with three different color pallets. In the first scene is this green, creepy color palette which really feels like it's in the middle of the night because of the strange perception of the night colors. I wouldn't expect the green to feel so much like a night, but as you can see, it works pretty well. Next, we have less saturated dark greens and the blue tones in the middle. All of them have different color emotion and mood. Depending on what you want to say with your artwork, you can use different color palette for the night. Light blue tones with wide bride moonlight can be used for a romantic scene, and the green and brown-green can be used for a creepy and scary setting. The next example also has less saturated colors. We can see the lights are turned on and there is a little bit of fog which helps to establish a night feeling too. Moreover, that's in this special example. You don't notice this effect on photographic examples that well. But older edges look quiet blurry during the night to us because in reality, we don't see that many details at night with our eyes. The whole painting have more muted brown tones in this example, and this is also a great option for your night scene. Another example is a combination of more colors, almost the full palette with less saturation. We have a fire which has orange color effecting the house nearby with a contrasting tone of a blue and green tone on the rest of the environment. Then, we have the clouds in all kinds of different color tones. There are also some green color tones in some of the trees, and the sky is blue. Because we have so many colors in this painting, notice that a lot of them have very low saturation, as we said at the beginning. Here, I have the same setting, but we can see how the lights are changing after the sun has disappeared behind the horizon. First, the sky is blue and the lights are just turning on. We can still see a lot of different colors in details in the city. In the next one, it's getting darker and more and more lights are popping out from the scenery. The details of the city starts to blend together in the distance. This color combination can be used as a nice romantic moment in your stories. In the next one, it's getting much darker and the blue sky is still there but all the other buildings are less saturated blue, and now they're all in really dark value tones. As you can see, you can play with amount of warm tones and blue tones, light and dark areas in the background to achieve different results for your night scenes. Here, you can see the comparison on the two paintings of the same moment in a different time. One is during the day and the one is during the night. On the left, there is a bright moonlight which is very illuminated and reflected on the water. All the other values are more blending together, like the guy on the boat, also the wood on the deck where the lady standing, and the background of the islands is darker and closer in one tone of the color with no details. The example on the right side, it's during the day and there, you can clearly see the shapes of the object which are not blended together like in the night scene. It is overcast day, so we don't have a direct sunlight in strong shadows. We have clouds, so the colors are less bright and less saturated. The sunlight is reflected through the clouds onto the water, and the water reflects sunlight also to the shadows, which we don't see in the night scene. The shadows are brighter and more illuminated in the day setting compared to the night setting on the left. Overall, we can see more variety of colors on the boat, on the outfit of the character opposed to the darker night scene. 20. Candle Light: Moving on to the examples of a candle in firelight. We have the performer with the light and fire eliminating the areas only near the fire. The rest of the video or the environment is in the darkness, because the fire doesn't have the influence on the long distances. Now, let's have a look at some of the candles indoors and we have an image from Japan here. We have a lot of them on the roof and because there is a lot of them, they make a whole room more orange. But when we look at the candles up close in one part of the image, they have very short rich of the orange light glow as you can see. The rest of the statues and other objects around in the room are affected by the window light coming towards the room, therefore, a lot of the objects seem quiet blue and more eliminated. If the windows were totally closed in this room, the objects would be less blue and more influenced by the orange light coming from the ceiling. But because the orange light from the ceiling is weaker than the window light, everything is more balanced. Let's look at some paintings with a candle light. Here we have a dark color values, almost black, where everything is hidden in the darkness. We only see a few character faces because they are close enough to the light of the candles. We can consider this painting also has a limited color palette example. We just feel use of orange and dark orange and also some brown value tones. Even though the candle itself wouldn't have such a strong influence on the environment, the art is made it like that to have a warm feeling overall from the whole piece. In the next example, we can see a nice composition created by using a candlelight, and the candle lantern. We have almost hidden light source behind the head of one of the characters, there is another character with a candle in the middle. What you notice first is the character and then the focus of the composition. There is a candle lantern on the ground which creates man's reflection on the ground. Parts of it light is blocked by the frame of the lantern. This combination of the shadow and light from the lanterns create visual interest lines, and it's leading your eye, and ending directly, and aligned under with a secondary character in the background. As you can see, you can create a composition. We just lie than shadows, to lead the audience around your image. Also let's look at how I would paint the candle lantern. You can find some real live references of a candle photography, and study the light reach and shadow behavior from them. The important is to keep the light from the candle in warm tones, and the environment in cool or cold colored tones. In my sketch, the lantern construction is blocking the light coming from the candle inside, so it's pretty similar example as we just looked at. That's why the light on the ground is not a round shape, but more in the directional straight lines following the perspective of the ground. Just for a reminder, that light travels in straight lines, and following the object which is casted on. I chose the dark purple, blue-gray in a lighter tones for the surroundings to suggest colors of the night scene. Notice that my purple color values are not lighter than the warm orange light from the lantern. Even though the areas in the shadow are saturated, notice that my purple color values are not lighter than the warm orange light coming from the lantern. The strongest orange light is near the lantern, and as it progresses away from the lantern, it's losing its power and its getting weaker and mixed more and more with the purple snow environment. When you look in the middle of the lantern, the light is almost white. The last thing that I implemented in this purple background are small brush strokes in different use of the same value tone. I had the purple, so I added some greens, and pink tones, so there is more color variety. In the last example of candle lights, are lanterns. As you can see, the lantern is brightest in the middle and darker on the edges. It also has a blurry edges, and it looks like it's glowing by doing this. By adding soft color with low obesity around the object like this orange what we have here, you emphasize the glow of each line lantern. Similar to the example from the photo in Japan, with all the candle lights on the ceiling, the lanterns are influencing the whole area and make it orange. The strongest light source in this image is the lantern near the character on the left. Casting the strongest and brightest highlights influencing her face, hair, hand, and the neck. Although the details like earrings and necklace are in the blue color using the complimentary color scheme, which is orange and blue. To bring more contrast and attention to the character by creating these differences in color, I wanted to avoid a completely monochromatic image which would be just in orange. If I wanted to have even more variety in the colors, I could have made the background in blue too. But didn't want to bring that much attention there. I also added some blue and orange sparkle dots traveling from the nucleus to the lantern to add more storytelling and magic to this image. If you wanted the magic to be even more visible, you could make the sparkles bigger or you can make it in a different color and they would send out even more. 21. Neon Light: As a last example of a night scene, is a neon light. Long time ago, neon light didn't mean more than the badly lit after hour bars and the strip clubs. Later on I just look at these medium and begin to integrating it into the works and portraits, photography and object displays. Now it's almost impossible to escape the trend of a neon art. Here we have some examples from the museum with the neon light on the ceiling and on the wall. Also the Time Square in New York, where it's bright also in the middle of the night. Here we have example of a light show during the Christmas in Commer in France. The lights are in different colors and we have this pink lights, dark pink lights, yellow stars, and everything is mixed together on one building. There is also a green neon light on the right side, that reflect it on the half sunken boats in the water. We also have the indoor warm light where people have a party. In this example, we have so many different light sources that it can get very complicated. Therefore, just think and observe which light is stronger, how far does it travel, and how many objects does it influence around and from which side? For example, firelight is usually weaker than the neon light, but the neon light is weaker than the sunlight during the day. Neon light can sometimes looks similar to a reflected light, but we can see the neon light also outside of the shadow area compared to the reflected light, which we see only in the shadows. 22. Color and Value: In this lesson, we will talk about value structures. Why do we need to talk about values? Values are important because they are a base for your colors. They create a sense of space and organize the focus areas in your artworks. As artists, we should have a strong value structure even before we go and select the colors. But don't worry, you don't always have to start with a black and white value structure, because it might not be exciting enough for you to paint just with black and white. You can start directly with color, also with more complex images, including more objects, because you can easily check your values along the way. You can turn on the black and white layer adjustment above all your layers to check your values whether they are correct. I often do this during the painting process to see if my values are correct, even if I start with just colors. Values are essential part for colors to be correct. Another use for a black and white value structure images, is when you don't want to set the mood for your artworks with color yet, you can use the value structure in the early stages of your painting process. Like in this first example, we have a black and white concept for a fantasy architecture. I was thinking to have something similar to a cute Italian village like Cinque Terre combined with underwater theme. I added some sea icons and animal shapes as a part of the architecture. Because everything is in black and white, it's easier to focus only on the design of the elements without being distracted by the color palette. In this example, we have a light source on top of the right corner, and we have a full range of value tones. For example, if you assign a blue to one of the values, we will have a full range of different blue tones. Once you are happy with your design and with your value structure, you can easily start coloring. A lot of new students are not sure how to go from black and white to color, so let's look at that. The easiest way, in my opinion, is to use a gradient map on top of your image. Automatically, your foreground and the background color is set based on what is the selected in your colors in the tools area at the moment. But you can also adjust it to whatever you want, just select different gradients from the gradient map selection. I apply this technique on this image and then I go to levels to adjust my color values. With a new layer set to color, you can also add different colors on top of your existing image. You can also add more highlights with overlay layer and more shadows with layers set to multiply. Here, I used only blue, one tone to keep it simple and similar to monochromatic deep dark sea waters. In the deep underwater places there is less light and they are more particles and everything seems to have a blue tint. Everything looks more like behind veil or a blue curtain, unless we take a picture with a flash, which would make the colors look different. For the concept art and stories is definitely more interesting when you add more colors than just blue to your artworks. You can also add nice light rays as an effect and you can do this just on a separate layer with a really soft brush or with a gradient from white to transparent. Within my selection, I erased some parts from these gradient so it looks more natural and disappearing at the end. Then I edit simple bubbles as a detail and you can paint some characters like mermaids or other details to make the artwork more interesting. This is just the start. You can use the black and white value structure to study any material because you are not distracted by the colors. You can just look at how the reflections on the material work without really thinking how the color is influenced. This is a good example how you can start studying materials. While talking about the value structure, we need to look at the exposure too, because this also influences our value composition. When you take photos, they could get either exposed to light or shadow. When they are exposed to light, the shadows are very dark and we don't see many of the details or objects in them very well. The cameras can't capture the same light and shadow as we see in the real life with our own eyes. In this picture we have a castle and the view from one of the towers. We can either set the focus on the camera on the tower outside, which is exposed to light. Or we can focus the camera on the shadow and we can see the details like the texture on the wall. But what if we want to paint both? Let's look at some of the examples of the old masters to get inspired how they dealt with this exposure to light or shadow. In this painting, the focus is on the shadow area. We can see all the beautiful details and variety of colors. The light is in the white color and it is the lightest area of the image. Though the areas in the shadows are not dark at all. They are very illuminated as you can see, but not as much as the areas where the sunlight appears. The second example is exposed to light. The areas in the shadow are almost completely black, which allows us to focus on the areas in the light. You immediately focus on the two dancers and everything else in the shadow is secondary for the composition. The shape of the dress, the pose, and also the drapery above them, is helping to lead our eyes to focus on the area of the composition which is important in the image, which is of course, in this case, the couple dancing. Let's go back to the castle example. I combine these two photos with the different exposures in the Photoshop to show you how I saw it in a real life. I also wanted to have some of the texture in the shadows. What I saw in the real life was the texture which was on the wall in the shadows and also the tower outside. It is useful to take pictures with both exposures, when you don't have time to paint on location and study all the details. Then you can just make some notes to remember the moment and details better because usually the camera never captures the details and the small color shifts as the human eye in both shadows and light at the same moment. Now I turn this photo into a concept art idea by adding various elements to the image. I will keep the same value composition as in the photo, with the world outside of the window having light value tones and indoors with the dark value tones. I decided to sketch the dragon on the tower we see from the window. It was really foggy day outside so the tower is pretty light effected by the fog. All the colors of the dragon are similar in tone to the colors of the tower so it blends better with the environment. We also need to paint a core shadow on his belly, contact shadow where he is touching the tower, and then also the shadow he's casting on the tower. Due to the weather condition, it is also diffused light because of the clouds. We will have a blurry shadows. At the end, I added some of these clouds and the fog just to blend the dragon better with the environment. 23. Value Simplification: Let's look at some old masters and their use of color because we can always learn a lot from them. How they structured their paintings and what colors they used in their value structures. In this example, you can see really strong high contrasting value structure. These values are simplified into three groups of black, white and gray, based on what is in the light and what is in the shadow. This is very helpful to think about three value simplified compositions when constructing your settings. So try to separate maybe foreground, middle ground and the background, and limit your value selection to just three values of black, white and gray for a start. For example, you can create the background to be in predominantly white tones, the middle ground in the grays and the foreground in the black tones. By limiting your value structure, you will help your characters to pop by having strong silhouette, and high contrast compositions tend to work especially well. Here we can clearly see the character with the high contrast in this example. In this image, the lightest values are on the character and on the book. We can see the silhouette clearly framed by the bookshelf behind her. The values are very simplified and the darkest parts of her outfit is almost blending into one shape with the area on the dark floor. We really have only three main simplified value groups, dark, medium gray and really light gray. So try to think about the various value composition structures in grouping your values into scenes you can see in the everyday life. Let's look at other examples. Here we have the main characters on the white foreground, really dark tones in the middle ground and the mid value range of grays in the background. You can also flip this around and you can have a foreground in light values, middle ground dark and background in the mid gray tones to have variety in your compositions. What do you do after you simplify our artworks into these three value groups? So once you have these three main value groups established, you can add more details and value shifts within those three value groups. Then you can paint within those areas. If you are in the darkest areas, you will paint with a really dark gray, black and lighter gray but still darker than the mid gray. You keep these three groups separated to keep the strong composition. To understand this even better, let's look at some real life photography and let's study environment around us and observe and decide what areas to prioritize in light or in the shadow. Studying environment around you and observing, deciding what areas to prioritize in light or in the shadow is another important observational exercise. So in this part, I will show you some real life examples, when you don't have to look for references online and you look around in your own environment. We can usually see the silhouettes easier during the sunset. So is the best to start practicing your three values simplification in observation. Here is a picture from the beach, I believe is a sunset in Florida. The foregrounded the palms has really dark silhouettes and I can imagine easily the rest of the image to have the middle ground using mid gray tones and the background using light value tones. Because this is close to the reality and what I see here, I will paint the foreground black, as I said, really dark gray value tones, background very light, almost white, and the middle ground will be similar to the background and it will have light gray tones. Here we have these nice palms in the foreground, which are already framing the picture nicely in the two-thirds of the composition. So I don't have to really think hard how to improve this composition. The palms are creating strong image with the feel of stability and calmness because of the straight lines of these objects. We can add discovery feel to this image by adding a stick and a cape to the character and also some ships in the background. We have a story. Let's put our real-life image with palms on top of the corner to compare our value structures. I assigned the blue color to one of my values in my seal concept and paint its small sketch with values and color shifts within the same value structure which I established in the beginning. I use the same value simplification principle in my painting of the seal diving in the waters. Water in the foreground and the rocks are very dark. The middle ground has lighter tones and the background water surface uses the lightest value and it's almost white. The highlights on the seal are also really white and we have the white highlights also on the stones to bring the attention to the character and point of the story. This way, it will stand out better from the mid gray value tones around them. The silhouette is mainly dark because we see it against the light, which is coming through the water surface into the water. You can also paint the white seal against the darkness of the ocean, if you want to try a different value structure with the same composition example. What if we have to paint the really, really complex image like we see here because of the client requirements? Maybe they want to have a lot of characters in the painting, a lot of activity and just lots of stuff happening. Here we have many character interactions with a lot of details. There is also a lot of building details and the fabrics. Wow. You can approach this in the same way as we looked at before with the three value structure composition, and these will help you a lot. Grouping the areas and the characters and simplifying the whole composition into three value groups: mid, dark and the light will help your process of deciding on colors and everything would become much easier. Even though the silhouette work really well with the strong contrasting compositions, it is also good to know that the value structures don't always have to have such a strong contrast, as we'll look at some of the examples until now. Let's look at some pictures and examples of the paintings where the colors are closer together in value, so you don't have to feel restricted to paint only with high contrasting three main value tones. As you can see in this example, the values are really close to each other. Despite there is not such a big difference among them, you can always see the shapes and the environment clearly; even in just black and white. Try to think about their value structures and how they influence each other when they are on the image. The same way as we talked about with the colors and the perception of the color depending on the other color which is next to it. Look at your values and think how they work together in one image. As a practice, I would like you to look at some photos and examples from the real life. Think how would you simplify the values into three groups, in the thumbnails or a bigger painting. Then paint some value shifts within those three value groups. You can also look at scenes from your favorite movies and do this experiment with them. Now, I will show you how I would approach this practice by selecting a photo reference of a llama standing in front of the mountains in Peru. I simplified it into a sketch of a three values, which you can see on the screen. Here I have very simplified value composition just to show you another painting style. Because painting style gets developed over time by exploring your likes and dislikes. Maybe you like color pallets from one artist, maybe you like brushstrokes from another or simplification and the form from another artist. Then you will combine it with the observation of the objects you find fascinating and with how you see the world around you. For example, you might like flowers, or animals, or cars, or zombies, or whatever it is and these will all blend into your own style. When painting from imagination, we show through reflection of our own life experiences and how we interpret the world around us. We are all different and what we see is different from the next person. When you take the example of the castle tower from earlier, everyone would imagine something else on the roof. I imagined a dragon. You might imagine a fairy godmother or a steampunk machine. The imagination is influenced by our own experiences, by our everyday life, our memories, our thoughts and our fascinations. Understanding of all these takes a lot of reflection and paying attention to ourselves, our interests, habits, likes and dislikes. As I mentioned to you here I am using three value tones and I create selections with the selection tool using sharp defined edges. Later I can select the areas quickly with the magic wand or I save the areas in the selection menu and I can use it when I need it. In this way. With every new value image composition, I just go to choose, and load the selection I created with a specific name before, and then I just fill it with white, gray or black tone. When you are happy with your value structure and maybe you know that the image will be quiet simple, you can use the gradient map and then just adjust the color with the layer set to color. Later, you can add even more colors to create shadow and light because we don't have it in this example yet. If you know that the image will be more complex, it would be the best to draw the shadows, details and the small value differences in shadows and highlights on the llama in black and white before using the gradient map to add the color to the whole image. 24. Color and Edges: Talking about art style, the brushstrokes are part of the artistic expression to how you use edges combined with style of your brushstrokes will also influence the color perception of your art. You can work with the soft edges and hard edges in different styles. Whether you create abstract brushstrokes and shapes, pencil sketches or a very polished and highly rendered detail illustrations, you can implement hard and soft edges in your art too. Before we will study the edges, let's talk about the style a little bit more. The style you choose for your art is influenced by your taste, but it also depends on who your audience is. Do you want to work for a big studio, look at their art books, where you can see the process artworks of the artists working for them and notice how sketchy or finished they are. Do you want to work for a card game company? Look at their artwork and style too. You can just explore the style of your own artworks and find what you like and create art in your style. Try to stay consistent so people can recognize your work. Now let's look at the sketch with simplified colors and values and how edges influence our perception of color and value. To study the edges, let's just use two examples of a circle sketch. One example shows defined edge and another shows the lost blurry edge. I chose dark blue color for the background and light blue for the circle. We can compare how we perceive the same color with the different edges next to each other now. As you can see, I use sharp edges on the ball on the left and soft edges on the circle on the right. Right away you can see how different the color feels, even though it is the same. The circle on the left with sharp edges feels much brighter than the circle on the right with blurry edges. Let's move our simple objects to the side and let's look at more complex examples. Do you remember when we discussed the visual language and what is in the focus of your artworks? When I created a bunch of different kites with blurry edges and on top of it, I put one kite with the sharp edges. You could see right away how the colors felt different and the focus of the image changed through. Let's take an example of a wild winter fox and how I work with edges on this image. We already mentioned this image in connection with warm and cold colors and the use of a quiet limited color palette. Edges will help us bring the focus to the area of the image we want, as well as the warm colors. We have a round circle shape for the silhouette of the fox. So there is nothing to distract us from the face. The most defined edges are on the fox's face. For example, the eye to bring the attention there. The next example is a portrait painting of a character using very bright colors. There is a lot of happening there. As you can see, I use bright red colors and also very bright green turquoise color of the hair. There are also bright skin tones and really dark colors for the eyelashes. So how do we make everything work together? By using edges of course, and variety of a brushstrokes. Even though all the brushstrokes here are pretty sharp and expressive, we can still work with the edges to define the shapes and areas of focus. I used a lost edge around the face so the brain can figure out how the shape is finished on its own. To drive the focus, the most sharp defined edges are at the end of the fringe, on the forehead close to the eyes. The lost edges are just where we have the hair and the shoulders because this was not important for me in this portrait. In the next example, we have a nice light from the back side of the image. The character has a hand against the light. I used all the soft edges on the hand there because I don't want the hand to be the main focus of the image. If I had the hand more defined there, it would be a lot of light value contrast, and it would steal the focus from the face of the girl. The lost edges are also in the outfit and in the hair. I use the sharp edges mainly on the face, defining the eyes and the mouth, which is the main focus of the portrait here. Let's look at another example. Here you already probably know the character. She's holding a bottle with a bright green liquid, which is already very dominant part of the composition because of its color and brightness. That's the main focus. My secondary focus is obviously her face. Everything else not that important. I just turned into lost edges. For example, around her hair silhouette and parts of her outfit. Sharp and more defined edges are used on her face, outfit, near the face, and the hands holding the bottle which is important for the story in this image. I also used some bright strokes with sharp edges as highlights to bring the attention to the bottle and her hair. 25. Color and Atmosphere: In this part, I want to talk about atmosphere, which creates a three dimensional realism in our artworks. It also influences our edges, color's, perspective, composition, and creates a sense of space. Atmospheric perspective is also called aerial perspective. Any these the effect that you get when far away objects take on the color of the atmospheric haze. We can use atmosphere to show scale and the mood in our artworks. Atmospheric perspective happens because we have a small particles in the environment which reflect some of the light and the color of the sky. What it causes is that the things further away from us look different in tone, sharpness and color. First, let's look at some real life examples. On our first picture we see flatland of Denmark. You can still see very far in the distance because there are no mountains. The atmospheric influence doesn't happen only with the mountains in the background, but with everything which is far away. Objects saturation, and the contrast decreases with the distance. An object's brightness increases with the distance. Objects which are closer to us, like the front grass and the bushes, are darker and more saturated green. Notice that the edges remain even when far away, color temperatures relationships they do. You can observe it in this example where we have the gradual transition of the colors from saturated, do less and less saturated in the far distance where it almost blending with the color of the sky. Let's move on to the next example. The photo I have here is from Japan, and it's also an overcast day. The sun is hidden behind the clouds and we can see these nice cherry blossom trees called also sakura trees. We have more saturated greens in the foreground. As we progress to the background, you can see the difference between the colors from the colors of the foreground mountain and the middle ground mountain, and also the mountain towards the horizon. Let's have the sketch on the side of the image so we can notice the colors better even though their interrelationships in the picture. The light coming from the sky is pretty cool, we don't have these warm sunny highlights on the trees. The highlights on the object are more in cool and light dawns. Notice that as we progress through the distance, we have the same value relationship on the trees. It has still the dark shadows and the light parts. It doesn't blend into one shape without shadow just being blue despite being far in the distance. I will also paint the flower on the side so we can see how the atmospheric perspective would affect the object with warm colors, like Pink and Orange. We have this beautiful cherry blossom petals. How does the atmosphere affect objects which are more in the distance? First, the shadow area of the object will be affected and become more blue. The areas in light will stay saturated longer, also further in distance. The object as a whole, is not affected by the blue tones of the atmosphere at the beginning, only when it's very far away. As we can see, the blue atmospheric reflected light from the sky on the particles in the air is first only in shadows. We already talked about the reflected light being visible only in the shadow. If we would bind only one solid blue tone over our cherry blossom flower, it would appear as if the flower is underwater and less like affected by the atmosphere. Here we will look at the sketch thumbnail for a concept art with atmosphere. During the creation of the concept art, I was keeping in mind that my foreground with the character would be the darkest area based on the reference picture on the left. Then I wanted to illuminate the shadow and put more vibrant colors in it. That's why I chose the purple color too. I also added some water in the mid ground just to have more colors and complexity in the environment. To bring more variety, notice that even though the water is blue, it is a different blue then the color of the sky. As you can see, everything in the background is affected by the atmosphere gradually. The painting is inspired by all the castles and the queued villages in Europe. I wanted to paint really colorful village inspired by Jean Gapera area in Italy. Where you have all these colorful houses on the cliffs, and you cannot even access the area by car. You can access the area only by a drain. The wide range of colors on the sun faded and the rustic houses were said to date back to the beginning of the villages. According to the legend, the fishermen painted their homes in such a rainbow colors so they could spot them from the sea, even from far distance. They would stand out for many of the seaside buildings. I also wanted to show you how the village with the colorful houses can be affected by the atmosphere too. The village is also affected by the light in this one area. We have the more saturated colors there in the light, in the mid ground, and our foreground is in the shadow. Same as, as it is on the photo from the Japan on the left side on the screen. When we were there, the water level was so low that we could even walk to the gate. There was no water like it's visible on many pictures on the Internet. I was quite disappointed by this. Anyways, as you can see on the photo, the part of the foreground is in the shadow. Then we have the most saturated colors as you progress back to the horizon. Everything is less and less saturated, but still keeping the value relationships. I also edit the gate from the photo on the left and the waterfall into our artwork. Notice that the waterfalls also have a different color of the blue, depending how far they are in the background. If you are interested to know, I spend around 40 minutes to create this sketch thumbnail. Finishing this illustration would be much easier because we already established our color and value relationships. Looking at one of the examples from the masters, notice that the atmosphere is affecting the color relationship value in the middle ground and also in the foreground and later background too. This painting is a great example how atmosphere can affect the environment and three many color tones on your objects from very bright, saturated colors in the foreground, except in the shadow, close to the viewer, to less saturated colors faraway. Let sample some of the colors from this painting on the side so you can see better, what is the difference in color in these three mountains? There is a lot of space in between them and the viewer. There is a lot of atmospheric perspective and they also have a different distance from the viewer. Atmosphere behaves in our images like a layer of semitransparent color affecting mainly the shadow and simplifying the value structure and you can see it mainly in the shadows in the distance. You can also see the value structure being maintained. Bounce light in the shadow here is very bright. This is another example of an atmospheric influence. Notice that the shadow areas in the distance have a different color than the shadow on the objects in the foreground. Also notice the color gradation of more saturated colors of the hues in the foreground and less saturated colors in the background on this beautiful winter painting. I will also skip simplification of this idea we are talking about next to the painting so you can see the colors easier. I also wanted to point out the composition of this painting. Look at the clouds. You can use the clouds to direct the eye of the viewer to the point where you want to. The clouds have a direction here. If you would want to put like a dragon or similar creature into painting to make it more fantasy like or epic, you would put it there where the clouds are heading. These would help the viewer to find the main focus of your image. What is more? The artist also uses these nice curved throughout to the foreground house to lead your eyes there too. Another example is with the standing horses on the desert. It is painted during the bright sunny day. You can see the strong effect of the atmosphere on the mountains in the background. It's still keeps the relationship of the dark and light values and the warm and cool part. Notice the shadows which are illuminated by these blue light from the sky. Even though the horses are dark, they have really light colors on top of them. Because of the direct sunlight. They have almost wide highlights because the fur or the skin of the horse is usually very reflective and glossy. They also have an orange color in the shadow on their belly reflected from the desert ground. Here I just painted the simple box, which should represent the horse. I use the box instead of the actual horse so we don't get distracted by difficult shapes of the horse and the complexity of the shadows. We have the warm direct sunlight coming from the right top corner. We also have a light coming from the sky from all different angles. Therefore the shadow of the horse is blue because the direct sunlight cannot affect this area. The horse is blocking it, but it's still affected by the light from the sky. Here is a comparison example of atmosphere effect and the cloud or fog effect on the mountains. When it drains, there is a more particles in the air and we see less of the silhouettes of the mountains. The color and value relationship is weaker, and we don't see the shape of the mountains very clearly compared to the ones which are affected just by the atmosphere. The mountains in the picture on the left, are just affected by the atmosphere and the shadows are more blue compared to the shadows in the picture with the fog. Areas in the fog are less saturated and more affected by the solid white overall color, not only in the shadow. 26. Fog and Rain: Following the example of the atmosphere, let's look at the fog example. Fog environments are also often used in the concept art to evoke certain emotions. In this video, we have a lake in Italy which is almost completely affected by the fog. We don't see the silhouettes and the details of the surroundings, clearly, almost everything becomes less saturated and how do we apply it to a concept art? Here you see, I already have the sketch layout from the example before. There is a female warrior going towards the deer, but she can't get any closer because she's on the edge of the ravine. I started by defining the overall color and I decided to go for a very light saturated green tone, almost Grey for the whole thumbnail sketch. I decided that the foreground will be the darkest and going further away, everything will be lighter because of the fog. The far away threes have only parts of their silhouette visible. The foreground is defined with the sharp edges and everything becomes more blurry in the background. By applying the fog to our painting, we usually create strange and uneasy kind of bad feeling and to emphasize the bad feeling, I also use [inaudible] shapes and trees without leaves. If you want to make the environment even more scary, you can add glowing eyes, which are quite scary to the, the deer. As we mentioned, fog usually creates fear of unknown because we don't see very far, and it usually appears in the movies and stories to create scary situations. Here we saw how dense atmosphere can affect colors in our art and also emotions of our audience. In addition to the fog, there is another weather condition which can affect our perception of the place with atmosphere, as you probably already know, is rain and it is very often sign of sad emotions. I want to show you an example of a setting with rain because it creates different type of atmosphere and also have a strong influence of the environment colors have you ever noticed that as rain drops from the sky, your mood sometimes drops too, or have you noticed that wherever the main hero in the movie is sad, or they have a bad day, it is raining outside. If you feel down during the rain, it's not just your imagination. Bad whether can indeed have a negative effect on our emotions by looking at these real life examples, notice the colors of the sky, materials and surfaces, reflections, and how they behave when they are affected by the water. After looking at some real life examples, let's look at how you can use it for your stories and implement it in art. In this drawing demonstration, I'm not starting from the line work, but from already colored example of a sunny day drawing and turn it into rainy Day. On the speed pane, we can see silk effect on the environment, like with a neutral diffused light on a cloudy day. The clouds cover the sunlight and everything becomes a bit darker. Therefore, I adjust the brightness and saturation in this painting with the adjustment layer first. I still want to keep the moderate amount of color so I need to watch out not to make everything too gray. We can see the red still quite bright on a rainy day. I want to make sure not to turn the saturation down, especially on this color too much. Because it is similar to the overcast day with the diffused light because of the rain clouds. Shadows of the characters are more soft and blurred out. The shadows which were there before on the sunny day where two sharp and defined. I blurred out the edges, especially under the deer and the female character. Because it is a rainy day, I need to paint over the blue sky and turn it into the gray skies. I created a selection for the background. I campaign faster within that area.I decided to go for the dark stone clouds and not just light gray clouds because I want to have a heavy rain. to add variety to the dark clouds. We can add some lighter areas where bits of sunlight shines through. The lighter areas are near the deer to highlight this part and lead your eyes toward the character. The hair of the female character is no longer floating in the wind because it's wet and more sticky. Where the hair is also darker than the dry hair because it's soaked up with all that water and also noticed I'm still keeping the red color saturation on the hair because as you saw on the red rain coat in the real-life examples, red is still quiet, vibrant. When the raindrops fall fast from the sky, we perceive them almost as lines. I paint the rain and I am just drawing simple white lines to suggest a lot of raindrops. When it's raining softly, we would perceive them as a vertical, a raindrop lines. If you want to make them moment less pleasant, we will create the rain with an angle like if it is windy as well in that situation to have a depth in the image and variety in the composition details, I will scale some of the water rain areas up and down, some are bigger and some are smaller. The raindrops appear bigger if they are closer to us and smaller if they are further away. The closer they are to us, the more blurry they appear to the viewer. I can blur out some areas of these raindrops. From all the rain. We have small ponds or pebbles created on the ground. They are similar color is the sky because sky reflecting them. The characters are reflected in them too and I'm conveniently placing the puddles near the characters. They can reflect in them. Emphasize a heavy rain, I am also drawing small white dots near the surfaces of some objects, suggesting that the water drops are jumping off from those surfaces, like the tree bark or top of the deer and to make everything even more realistic, I edit small circles where the water drops heats the surface of the puddles. The plants become more reflective and glossy when they are wet too. That's why I added some extra wide reflections to the foreground plants. On top of this objects like fur and wood absorb water. They're darker on the top where the rain affects them first. This is an example how you can quite quickly change thumbnail ideas from one mode to another. Always notice how weather or light conditions effect objects in your environment. You can implement it in your art. And now let's move to the next example of the atmosphere, which is atmosphere and color effects underwater. 27. Colors underwater: Continuing with the water-related topic. Let's have a look on how is underwater. Water absorbs light in ways that the air does not. The common question is, why we see the oceans and sea water blue? The orange, red, yellow, and green wavelengths of light are absorbed underwater. Therefore, the remaining light we see is blue and violet, which is shorter in wavelength of light. When you are closer to the surface, you can see more colors because the light gets through easily. When the waters are shallow and clear, we can see the light reflected in the shapes of the waves on the sea floor and also on the fish and animals. Shallow waters can be also more turquoise influenced by the particles in the water and the color of the materials are at the bottom. Depending on how deep you are underwater, you can see your skin become more and more blue. When you are closer to the surface and the water is clean, the color of your skin is not affected that much. In this video, I'm snorkeling in Florida looking for a Manatees, they're very cute sea cows, and if you don't know them, they're mammals which can stay underwater for up to 20 minutes and they can sleep there too. You can observe light reflections on the Manatee because the water is not so deep. There is a lot of light coming through the surface of the water and it's affecting the animals and the humans underwater. Notice that when the Manatee is swimming further away from us, it's getting more and blended with the environment. It's because of the particles in the water. Water is approximately 800 times denser than air, and this density absorbs light very quickly. Deeper you are, the less light there is. Not only that, there is a less light, but what we see is Dow monotone colors and the density of water also decreases our ability to see contrast and object details and sharpness. In deep waters, there are no live reflections on the sea floor either. It's more dark navy blue. Of course, when you are creating your Concert Bart, you don't have to keep these realism of the monotone colors because then your art wouldn't be so exciting and colorful maybe as you want. Think about how you can bring colors together with the realism of underwater world. By keeping everything more blue and less sharpness of the objects you have in your artworks. The last light source I want to talk to you about these bio luminescence. Bio luminescence is a light produced by a living organism using a chemical reaction. Many deep sea organisms are able to create living light through this chemical reaction, bringing light to the otherwise total darkness of the deep ocean. We can find these type of light, mostly in the ocean animals like jellyfish or other deep sea creatures to attract mates of the same species or to lure the prey. In deep sea fish, bio luminescence provides illumination. For some other species they radiate, red bio luminescence, enabling them to see a red pigmentation in their prey. In fact, it's estimated that up to 90 percent of deep-sea creatures produce some kind of bio luminescence. The most common color we see created by bio luminescence life underwater is blue and green. We can also see the bio luminescence glow within some of the mushrooms, scorpions, and also within the insect. The best-known glowing creature is the firefly, and we already mentioned fireflies in one of our first chapters, and how you can use it in your stories. In this video, example is just a reference from an aquarium because I didn't create any amazing ocean deep underwater footage with bio luminescence. It is a fish tank from the underwater world in Denmark, mostly illuminated by a neon light, which can appear similar to bio luminescence. You can find many references for the bio luminescence light online when you decide to paint these type of light. Just remember it's coming from inside of the animals and creatures and it's not outside type of light. Like when object is affected by a neon light. 28. Materials and Surfaces Part 1: One of the last things I want to talk to you about are the materials. Because materials and surfaces helped guide the storytelling and evoke emotions in your art too. For example, a polished and very clean white surface in the room, would ever different emotion than the grass meadow or a dirt road. Materials and the surfaces influenced the colors of the objects. Sometimes they take color of their environment. The surfaces tell us how much highlight to paint to create object realistically, any what color too. When you know how to create materials in your art. It will help you to make your art more believable and it will guide your storytelling. We have many different types of materials and surfaces, I decided to show them to you in categories. We can distinguish materials into groups of, for example, smooth and rough materials. In this painting, we have two metal surfaces. I have the metal photo reference example on the second screen where I'm studying the colors and the reflections of these type of surface. Both of these objects have reflective surface, but one with smooth and one with the rough surface. I'm looking at how much light from the environment, we can see reflect it on that surface. If the highlights are blurry or have a sharp edges. We already discussed that the reflection happens when the light bounces of the object. If the surface is smooth and shiny like glass, water or polished metal, the light will reflect at the same angle as it hits the surface. For painting the ball with a smooth polish surface, I use soft airbrush, not to have rough textures. The highlights have defined shapes and they are not blurred. There is a sharp, fast transition from light to dark color on the smooth object because they can reflect the details on the environment clearly. You can see these type of reflection, for example, on the lake when you see the mountains and trees reflected on it. As we mentioned before in some of the examples, the water is reflective surface. When the water in a lake or sea is very still, the reflection of the landscape is perfect, because the reflecting surface is very flat. However, if they are ripples of the waves in the water, the reflection become distorted. This is because the reflecting surface is no longer flat and may have humps caused by the wind. Looking again at our drawing of a metal ball, in this case of a rough reflective surface, reflected light rays scatters in all directions. This is called diffuse reflection. Diffuse reflection is when the light hits an object and reflect in lot of different directions. These happens when the surface is rough and you can see these type of reflection on the object on the top. Most of the things we see are because the light from a source has reflected of it. If we think about the physics of light, for example, if you look at the ball, the light has reflected of the ball and traveled in nearly all directions. If some of that light enters your eyes, it hits retina at the back of your eyes. An electrical signal is passed to your brain, and your brain interprets the signals as an image. To paint the rough metal surface, I use textured brush. This object is still very reflective, so the highlight is very bright. The transition from light highlight to dark colors of the object is more smooth. If we would have less reflective material with a rough surface like wood, it will not have such a strong highlight, but rather only lighter and darker tones. For example, colors of the wooden plank can be only two main color tones. Mid brown tone and darker brown tone, for example. Now the full range of browns from white, light brown, mid brown, and really dark brown to black. If you have a bigger range of values on the object, it usually suggest that the object is very reflective. It is not necessary for you to know the technical names of all the reflections but you should know that we have more types of reflections and how we can see the objects when they are in interaction with light. 29. Materials and Surfaces Part 2: Now let's look at some real life example. I have these two examples in different materials: one soft and non-reflective fur on the deer, and one hard and reflective material on the chain. You can see the difference between the chain reflections and highlight and the dear fluffy fur highlights. The materials reflect the light differently. Chain highlights have really sharp transition from light to dark compared to the more smooth transition from light to dark colors on the deer. What is also adding to the complexity of color on the deer is variety in color of its fur. Some of the dark and light areas on the deer are not caused by the light and shadow. On the second example, we have a rock statue in Japan overgrown with the moss. We have, again, diffused light so we don't see a strong cast shadow from the statue. Notice that we don't have a bright white highlights or fast transitions from light to dark colors. All the colored transitions are more smooth. The next example is in a direct sunlight. You can see how reflective is the golden wall clock area compared to the rock wall. The gold on the clock seems almost to be glowing in the sunlight. Notice that also the red leaves have very reflective areas. Some plants can have very reflective surfaces. On those leaves, we can see quiet, fast transition from very light colors to very dark tones of color. The other example I wanted to show you are these raindrops on the flowers. Objects which are transparent or semi-transparent take the color of the objects behind them. The water drops on these pink flower are pink with bright highlights reflecting the light of the sky. The water is very reflective, so that's why we see the strong bright highlights on the edges of the drops. Here are some more examples with the diffused light. We have soft surfaces diffusing light in different directions compared to the really high reflective surface on the left. In this example, you can notice that the polished wood on the floor has really reflective surface. This example is super cute fluffy cat, which we were bed sitting in the Italian part of Switzerland. The cat has really fluffy fur which doesn't reflect light in one direction like a smooth reflective surface. Therefore, we don't see the strong highlight on the fur. We can see the highlights on the wet areas like the eyes and the nose. This is how you can make the faces of your characters pop, by adding more highlight to more smooth and wet areas like eyes, nose, even cheeks in some parts of the hair. You can also see the reflected light from the warm, reflective polished wood on the floor hitting the fur on the cheek of the cat. That's why the cheek we can see on the left of the cat in the shadow is more reddish than the rest of the fur. On the next example of the cat painting, I am using the effect of the reflected light in the shadows too. I used the purple reflected light to eliminate the shadows more. The bright reflections are on the nose. I also added them to the paws to make them stand out more. In the real life, the paws would not have such a strong bright white reflections because they have a rough surface usually. When the cat is very small, the paws can be still soft and smooth and reflect more light. So I have excuse to use these highlights here. The darkest areas are under the chin and under the paws. The shadows have very smooth transitions because the fur is not a reflective surface. This is how I would use a real-life photo reference of a cat for a painting. Here you can see my observation of the object and surfaces from the real life. We have a neutral diffused light in doors combined with a window light. Therefore, everything feels more blue to me. We have a transparent thick glass bottle, wooden table and wooden box in the background. Notice the different reflections on the object and how the overall painting feels. As a practice, I would like you to find objects with different surfaces and study how they behave in interaction with light. 30. Materials and Surfaces Part 3: Another material which I want to talk to you about is water. There is a variety of colors in the ocean, from form near to the coast, which is almost white through greenish brown close to the coast, to dark green in the background. The color of the water always depends on the particles which are in the water. How clear it is, how much light can it get through in there, also, it's depth, color of the bottom of the sea, and also what angle we're looking at it. So there are a lot of variables. That is why we can see so many tones of the color when we look at the sea or the ocean. The ocean is mainly blue color because the water absorbs color in the red part of the light color spectrum. Like the fielder, these leaves behind the colors in the blue part of the light spectrum for us to see. The ocean may also take a green, red or either hues of color as light bounces off on the floating sediments and particles in the water. Water is really reflective material, and we have a bright sunny day in this painting and you can see the water reflections on top part of the fountain. You only see the reflected lines because the waves broke the reflection. As we already know, the light reflects based on the shape of those waves. Just to point out, this painting has simplified values, and therefore we see this bright light reflections with a hard edge on the stone characters statue. In the real life, we would see smoother transition and soft edge on these light and shadow side because the stage is from the stone. Remember, despite of these example, usually the non-reflective stone would have a soft slow value transition. I wanted to show you this next example because of a highly reflective white pot. You can see the reflection from the tablet and what is on the screen, really strongly and clearly on these wide pot. Another example is the simplified portrayed with very expressive brush strokes. Her outfit is emphasized with the bronze and gold areas. Even if you want to use more rough brushes as here, you can still convey the idea of the reflective surface like the bronze and gold, by using a fast transition from light to dark. In contrast to the reflective materials, I'm not adding strong bright highlights to her skin or her hair, because I wanted to keep them looking soft. In this way, you can contrast the highly reflective materials with a soft materials in one painting. Let's also talk about the skin. Because that's one of the materials which people sometimes have difficulty with. Skin can have so many colors, especially the pale skin. The colors vary with the thickness of the skin. For example, for people with very thin skin on the lips, the lips are more red because we can see the blood flow. In some areas of the skin we can also see the veins and the skin appears more blue or green. Overall, the face tends to have the warmer, cool tones in the forehead area, reddish tones in the middle, like the cheeks and the nose area, and the bluish stones in the bottom area of the chin, especially with the male characters. I'm using brighter, more saturated pinky stones for the cheeks and more bluish greenish drones for the areas of the chin and the orange tones for the forehead, as we mentioned in the previous part. In this portrait example, we have a characterized the ending by the window, which causes the light and shadow pattern on her face. In this example, I also use the reflected blue lights tone in the shadow on the left side. I use more blue saturated colors to eliminate the shadows of it. You can also see some of the reddish color tones that are used for her lips. Notice that it is not only one tone of red. I use more warm colors of the red scale and also some cooler tones of the red in the darker areas. To emphasize the eyelids, I use bright highlights to bring the attention to the eyes. We can usually see some of the highlights in the corners of the eyes, and in the eyes where the surface is wet and smooth. I also used really bright blue color for the ice, so the eyes thinned out from overall orangery tones of the skin. Smooth or wet lips will also usually have a strong highlight. But in this case they are in the shadow, so I didn't use the highlight at all to keep the attention mostly on the eyes. Also notice desaturated tones of the skin from the areas where you go from shadow to light. This will help your skin in the painting look more like it's glowing. What is interesting about skin, is that skin is one of the materials which has subsurface scattering. This means it seems like it's glowing from inside in some situations. You can see and observe these, especially if you place your hands against the sun, or when part of the light hit the skin, which is overall in shadow. Take for example, debit light on the character on this example. Semi translucent objects like skin which lie the rays enter, bounce around, then exit in a different place. This causes the previously mentioned saturated edge of the shadow transitioning to light. Many organic and inorganic materials are not totally opaque right at the surface, so light does not just bounce off the top of the surface, instead sunlight also penetrates the skin surface deeply and scatters around inside. They can on the color of the inside and emerging back out in a different location near the area it entered. So human,animal skin, the skin of grapes, tomatoes, fruits, wax, gels like honey or jello have also this property. This creates the perception of brighter and saturated colors where we see the transition from the light to shadow on the skin, as we already mentioned. You can see here on the skin exposed to the part of the sun ray. There is also highlight where the sun affects the skin, and around the highlight, we see that much brighter color of the scattered light from under the skin. You can also notice how the white shoe takes the color of the sky because it's in the shadow and not influenced by the sunlight. Let's have a look at some paintings from the old masters to see how they approach different materials in their art and how they painted light skin, because that's always really difficult. We have a phase with a variety of colors of these pale skin and we can see the red tones in the cheeks, nose and the lips, where we see the blood circulation. Blue tones where the veins are more visible through the skin, and we can also see the comparison of the two different materials, the skin and the metal earring, which has really hard edge material with a bright reflections and the file value transition from light to dark. Here we can see highly reflective materials and non-reflective doll materials in this main thing. This image is very nice comparison of combination of different materials in one artwork. The dress has very reflective surface, so it has a fast transition from light to dark value tones. Notice the variety in the colored tones on the dress across the whole area of the dress material. We can even see the skin and it's orange tones reflected on the dress. In terms of storytelling, the material of the dress also suggest that this person in the painting is wealthy. You don't always have to create very realistic and highly finished illustration, like we see on this right side. As you can see on the other example, you can still define the materials and the reactions to light, even if you choose really loose strokes and more abstract painting style, as we also looked at in the videos with edges. In this example, you can notice the contrast between the materials of the dress with reflective and the non-reflective areas compared to the chair, we'd say my reflective areas. Also notice the soft surface of the skin, which has light luminescence. The fancy dress has these really bright and strong reflections only in some areas, because the other parts are created from the less reflective fabric. You can use this combination of materials on your characters to bring more visual interest to them. You can, for example, combine down, non-reflective leather with highly reflected armor. Next example shows the transparency of the materials. Materials can be fully transparent or semi-transparent. The water bubbles we talked about before, are fully transparent because we can see the background and all the colors of the objects behind them. Objects like fabric could be transparent and also semi-transparent. On these amazing detailed and realistic painting, we can see the example of a transparent material of the fabric. We can see it for example, in the areas near the skin where we see the skin through the fully transparent fabric material. So how do you paint a wide transpiring fabric? You would start with the shape of the material and you just paint the edges of the object. In other words, the silhouette of the object. If it is a fabric like in this case, you would paint also the fault in white, you don't need to paint the rest of the object because we should see what is behind it. Then you can add a soft wide gradient from white, solid color edges to the middle of the object where the gradient disappears. If you look at it more closely, on this painted fabric is really just wide painted edges in the shape of the fabric folding over the characters, and there is also some smooth wide gradient from wide defined edges, which then disappears into the colors of the skin which we see behind the fabric. Here are some more examples of a semitransparent and transparent materials. We can notice the semitransparent fabric on the male character, where we see more of the color of the material to compare to the transparent fabric outfit on the female character, where we can see more of the skin color behind the fabric. 31. Materials and Surfaces Part 4: Now, let's look at the materials in more complex settings and how we can apply the material painting in our concept art. Let's take, for example, bubbles. Bubbles are transparent and they behave similar to the water drops on the flowers and transparent fabric we've looked at previously. We know that the bubbles are fairly transparent or semi-transparent because they are created from liquid. Also, influenced by the chemicals in the liquid, they can have colorful highlights and because of the transparency, we can also see the colors of the background behind them. To create more bubbles faster after you paint one bubble, you can just copy it and transform with liquify tool and repeat, and repeat. Every bubble should have different shape and size to keep it realistic. To keep the variety in the visual interest in the image, create different thicknesses of the wide edge on the bubbles. For example, one side of the outline can be thinner and the other side thicker. I also added and that I previously mentioned colorful highlights on the sides of the bubble with the soft brush and the low opacity of the layer. Also, I wanted to have some of the leaves flying in the bubbles to create this fantasy magical feeling. I painted a green leaf and then lowered the opacity so it looks like it's inside of the bubble. The color of the leaf in the bubble is influenced by the soft layer of whiteness of the bubble liquid. I created the hair of the female character by using a full silhouette and solid color for the base of the hair. I did not paint each strength of the hair at the beginning. The straight hair can be compared to the silk ribbons and how they reflect the light in curves where they bend. After you are happy with the base shape of the hair, add some darker strands to the hair too, but not evenly distributed. It's because the hair falls down on the shoulders in unevenly distributed bunches. Also, draw the hair strands with different distances to each other to make them look more realistic. To bring the variety, you can then add some lighter hair on top of everything. We can also see the soft, non reflecting fabric in this material. You can notice it on the soak in this image. These fabric has a non-reflective, rough surface. It doesn't have a bright highlight and the gradient from light to dark color is very smooth. If you look at the animals, you can approach the fur, the same way as you would approach the hair. First, you paint the beak shapes and the silhouette of the animal and fill it with basic color, defining the dark areas and the light areas and the details of the phase of the animal. To simplify the fur, you will draw parts of the fur mainly in the areas where the shadow meets the light and on the outside of the silhouette. Another material we should notice here are the plants. Because there are so many different types of plants, flowers, and leaves with all kinds of surfaces, we always need to check references. To make our artworks more interesting, it is good to combine few different types of plants in one image. For example, you would not paint all the plants round or all the leaves small in the same shape. The variety and the imperfections bring your art to live. In this example, the plants have different types of illumination, reflectiveness, and transparency. The important is to keep the perfection and high symmetry for the man-made object, because that's what we know from the real live. To also avoid toxic looking plants, try not to use highly saturated greens. To create saturation, choose more warmer and more yellow bright tones. You can use also warmer, brown tones with some blue reflected light in the shadows. To aid vibrancy and create these realistic feeling with a subsurface scattering on the leaves, I used more saturated line of the warm color tones in the area where the shadow meets the light. Also, notice that all the leaves have different shapes and sizes to create more realism. When we look at more manufactured, man-made shapes, there is more symmetry and more repetitive shapes. Take, for example, the bird cage. Notice, again, that the wood is not reflecting the light strongly. So it doesn't have very bright reflections and fast transition from light to dark tones of the color. If I wanted to add more realism to the bird cage, I could add some scratches and some cracks on the wood, but this object is out of focus in the background of my image and it's not important for my story. So I will leave it as it is. If we look at the chain right next to the bird cage and it's reflections, they are very defined and sharp. There is a variety of value tones with fast transition from light to very dark. Because it's a man-made object, we can't create more symmetry and the repetition compared to the plants. To make it easier for yourself, you can just paint part of the chain and then just copy and repeat until you create the full chain. You can even find the Photoshop chain brushes. Is there so repetitive in shape? Studying material is a very common practice for artists to enhance their skills. Every surface on the material is unique and in how it reads the light based on its properties. As an artist, it is your job to capture these nuances. Make a practice of looking at each material in real life or look at some reference images if you don't have the possibility to see each material. Study their surface and behavior. Are they completely smooth? Do they reflect the light in the concentrated area? Does any of the light pass through them and creating colorful shadow? Keep asking questions for each of the materials and treat it like if you are studying it. The more you understand the material, the easier it will be to translate it in your artwork. As a practice, I would like you to paint few material studies next to each other. Study each material closely and examine the differences between each material to create nine different spheres. Choose the different materials which are most interesting for you. I suggest armor, gold, crystal, ice, jello, honey, babble, skin, leather, wood, orange, rock, or fur. You can choose whatever you like. To summarize the topic of materials, you can remember the moment better when you draw, observing, and giving it the full attention. You will also experience the places you visit in a different way. You don't have to become the outdoor painter if you don't like it. Just focus on noticing the relationships of colors and shadows and this will be really beneficial for you. Even though you might find real live locations or moments sometimes boring, you will create the visual library in your head, the scenes, the colors, composition, and moments. You can use the full ideas and experiences, or parts of it in the fantasy artworks later on, because most of our artworks are equal parts mixture of a foundation and invention, and without one, the other just wouldn't be the same. Good dose of observation from real life with large amount of experimentation with different tools you like, materials, surfaces, or tools you don't even like. An imagination mixed all together helps you to develop as an artist and also understand what to draw and what not to draw in compositions and why. Overall, observation from real life gives us the opportunity to apply what we know in our art in later stages of our art process. For example, composition, color relationships, perspective, and even anatomy. Observational helps us to understand better what to look at, what to look for, and also what we are looking at based on what we already know. Studying value, color, form, light, and shadow, while putting our knowledge of the materials in practice as well. From a lot of observation, you will also know how color and light work and you will not need a reference images for everything. It is like if you paint, for example, dragon 1,000 times, you will never need a reference image for a dragon. Or if you would paint hundreds of images of snow, then you know how the snow looks like in every weather condition, but you should never feel bad about using references. You are solving a design problem. You just need to have a ride looking design solution. Usually, clients don't care if you use reference images. They just want to have awesome design solution for their needs. Of course, you shouldn't copy exact images of one artist or one photographer. You can get the inspired by their color palette, by poses of the characters, or other details in combinations of different references. Before I left observation from real life, I marked what I saw with just colored tones next to my drawing. Then I also took a photo as a reference so you are able to fix the composition if you need to and add details later in the image. I'm also not worrying about perspective or composition at this moment, because I can pick these parts later in the process and also, I wasn't focused on these practice during this sketch time. Get out, observe the materials around you and always ask yourself if the material is smooth, dull, non-reflective, soft, rough, transparent, or semi-transparent. Go ahead and have fun. 32. Final Thoughts and Class Project: You have finished a whole course, congratulations. There is always more to learn and practicing healthy to improve. Now I would like you to apply what you just learn. So create one artwork, character or a scene, or a scene with a character and apply values, edges, materials, sources of light to emphasize the story moment, and emotion. If you don't feel like creating your own artwork just yet, you can download the line art I uploaded and practice with them. You can find it in resources and you can use my color palettes, the ones in examples, or to get even better, you can explore your own. Also try to use variety of hard and soft edges, differences in values in all the images, for example, out there made the light sources or use all the light colors for the foreground elements, and in the other versions use the light colors only for the background elements and also as in the previous practice examples, you can create simple artworks using flip colors or word with painterly brushstrokes and textures. Also if you are into traditional paints, you can go ahead and apply them too like acrylics,you can also work with other colors if that's your medium. I am looking forward to seeing your artworks and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask in the comments. Also if you have constructive feedback for other students, share it because it's always nice to help others to succeed. So thank you so much again for taking this class, don't forget to subscribe, to be notified when I release new courses and until next time, keep creating and making what you love. Bye and see you soon.