Painting Multiple Lights - From Simple to Complex Compositions

1. Trailer: Welcome to this class on painting with multiple light sources. In this lesson, we're going to take a look at how to best juggle painting with more than one primary light source in our compositions, utilizing a mapped out approach. We'll first do an overview of the anatomy of light and shadow before tackling two painting demonstrations, one simplified, and one more complex hit a little bit more fun. If you struggled painting with several light sources in your art, then this is going to be the class for you. So let's get going. 2. Difficulties With Multiple Lights: Learning to paint with one light source in our compositions is tricky enough, but it becomes a more daunting task when we try adding in multiple sources of light. When we start learning about light and shadow, we always practice with a singular light source. First, this gives us an opportunity to get comfortable with learning about the different areas of light and shadow, as well as how these areas behave across different objects shapes. However, the more light sources we have, the more difficult things start to become. We'll usually have to think things through a lot more because these multiple light sources are going to interact with each other to varying degrees, which is inevitably going to slow us down a lot. So it's an added layer of complexity. The good news is, however, understanding how these light sources interact and intersect with each other is not all that difficult. It really just comes down to time and practice on our part as to how well implemented it is. So this lesson is going to show us a pretty straightforward method for crafting more than one light source, and then we'll follow it up with a couple of demonstrations that you can follow along with. 3. The Anatomy of Light and Shadow: First look at the anatomy of light and shadow before we do anything else. Anything three dimensional can be broken up into an area of light and an area of shadow. Commonly, when we paint, it's a good idea to lay these areas in flat first and foremost at whatever value that we need. This gives us a nice easy framework to build from. To give these areas form, however, we need to subdivide them even further. For our light side, our subdivisions are the highlight, which is the brightest part of our object and the midtones, which is the darker transitional plane before the shadow. On the shadow side is the reflective light or bounce light as it's also called, which is the light that reflects into our objects shadow from the surrounding environment. And the core shadow edge, which is the darkest area that forms across our object. This core shadow can be considered the boundary line between our light and shadow sides. This boundary gets created when two light sources clash with each other. And because everything in our environ both receives light and reflects light, it means this boundary line is almost always going to be present to some degree. In almost all cases, we will have a primary light source which is significantly brighter than the reflective light source. So in short, a strong primary light, a weaker reflective light, and a darker core shadow between the two of them. But what happens if we add in a third light source? What happens then? Well, if two light sources create one boundary line, then it stands to reason that any additional light sources will also create their own boundary line. If we look at this example here, we've got our main core shadow boundary being mapped out, but we've also got now a newly formed core shadow being created from our new light source. How noticeable this new boundary is going to be is going to depend entirely on how intense that new light source is. If it's almost as strong as our primary light source, then this new core shadow is going to be pretty obvious, not nearly as dark as our main core shadow, but certainly noticeable. What we're also going to find is that as these lights overlap each other, we're going to see a noticeable shift in hue and value in the areas where they crossover. If we look at this example again, what was once a relatively dark area at the top here now seemingly has this little lighter wedge shaped present. The more lights that we have overlapping each other, the brighter things start to become. We might have three light sources that each on their own are very dull, but if we overlap them together, suddenly the surface becomes a lot brighter. Now, in most cases, our light sources are going to be at different levels of brightness in our composition. So our job when figuring out how to manage multiple areas of light is to first work out the order in which they should go. We want to create for ourselves a hierarchy of light, starting with our primary light source first and following on with whatever number of other light sources we want to include after that. We want to map out the boundary lines between them and to pay attention to where their colors and values shift when they start to overlap each other. Our goal is to not only understand the structure of light, but also understand the role that each light source plays in our composition. We want to consider our lights as being almost like characters in a story. Our primary light is the lead character, and our secondary lights are the supporting cast. So hopefully, that gives enough of a rundown of the basics of light structure. Let's move on to doing some demonstrations. 4. Ball Demonstration - Primary Light: Going to start with a simple ball exercise first and then we'll do something a little bit more fun and sophisticated after this. We've got our cien ball here in the reference looking very much like the planet urinus and a whole bunch of swatches separated into their respective areas, and we'll talk more about those as we go along. And we'll starting with the local color first, which is more or less just the average color of our light side, the middle value swatch right there. We have our main shadow color down here, our darkest saturated blue, and, of course, our core shadow, which is going to separate our light and shadow sides. Now, for our color groupings, we've got our primary light source of color, which is coming from the top right. These are our brightest colors. So this is our primary light source. We've got our secondary source of colors. This is our secondary grouping over here that's coming from the top left, more vibrant in color but not nearly as bright. And in the middle here, we've got these slightly more magenta looking swatches. This is an area between our primary and secondary light sources, so they're going to merge together. And here, finally, we've got the palette of colors for our shadow area as well. We'll explain why there's a lot of colors going on here as we go along. There's a lot more color variation that's happening in the shadow side compared to the other light sources. So three light sources, one primary, one secondary, and one reflective light source that's coming up from the table. So let's start with the core shadow. Our primary core shadow, start mapping that in and really wrapping it around the surface of that ball. We've got to think three dimensionally here, so we want to wrap around nicely like so, and that's our primary core shadow. Now for our secondary one, I want to once again wrap that around the surface, too. So we've got our core shadows both mapped out. These are the areas that we want to paint within. And essentially now it becomes a coloring inbook, I suppose. We want to paint within the lines with our respective swatches for each light source. Now, I like to start with the shadow area first. That really starts to help with generating the form for the image because we have to think three dimensionally as we're painting here. We need to really feel like we're wrapping this shadow around the surface of this ball. And we don't need to get totally accurate with the colors right now. We just need a nice neutral beginning to get the ball rolling, no pun intended. So that's a pretty good start for the shadow side, and we can just start to blend things in a little bit, as well. So just keeping things nice and rough for the moment, and we'll add more color in here as we go along. In fact, we'll find that the shadow side is often got the most color in it. So moving over to our primary light source now and just choosing the brightest of our swatches, and we can see here in the reference image, it's a very matted surface on this ball here. So this is our main light area on our light side. You'll also hear it referred to as the cenaltes capturing most of that brightness. We, of course, have the highlight, as well, which is more difficult to see on this more matted surface. The highlight is the most direct reflection of our primary light source, but it's more noticeable on glossier objects. It's usually the last little speck of pure white that you would put in your scenes. So that's our brightest area done for the moment. Let's move on to the midtones, which is the little transitional area that happens on our light side. So it's a slightly darker value, but we'll also start to see a little bit of shift in the saturation as well as the hue as well. Things get a little bit more saturated in the mid tones, and what usually happens as well is that the hue will start to shift as well. So we started with a sort of light blue cyan color, and that mid tone is going to shift to being a little bit more violet. So the mid tone is not just a transition of value, it's a transition of saturation and hue as well. So it's good to keep that in mind. So just blending these a little bit together like so. And we start to get most of our light side more or less done right now. So we started with our local color, added in our bright light area, added in our midtone, as well. And the first part of our ball is done. 5. Ball Demonstration - Secondary Light and Shadow: Okay, onto our second light sauce now. This one is not going to be nearly as bright as our primary light sauce. However, it is going to be significantly more saturated. It's a very saturated light sauce that's actually going to overwhelm the local color of our ball. So we're not really mixing red and blue to get a purply violet color here. That red light is so intense that it's pretty much canceling out that underlying local color. But not to the point where it starts to take over as the primary light source. So there's still a little bit of grayness that's happening in this side. There's still going to be a mixing of the colors. It's just that it's still going to lean heavily towards these bright orange red hues. So just adding in a little bit of the darker shadowy area and following along with the core shadow. And again, down below as well here. Now what we want to do next after this is that we've got that little wedge shape now that is going to blend those two colors a little bit together. That's because what's happening here is that we're going to get not just a mixing of colors, we're going to get a mixing of light intensities because our primary light and our secondary light are overlapping each other in this small little area. It means that our lights are going to start to stack on top of each other, the more lights that we stack on top of each other, the brighter things start to become. This little wedge shaped area up the top here, normally wouldn't be this bright, but because our primary and secondary light sources mixing together, it starts to make the value here just a little bit brighter. We don't want it as bright as the light side, however, so we do have to just be mindful of that, and just refining this second core shadow a little bit more, making sure that this one fades off a little bit more, this one is going to be a little less obvious. So we just need to keep in mind and keep track of what our hierarchy of light is. And the more we're able to do that, the easier this starts to become. It does seem a little bit fiddly doing things this way. But if we can learn about the structure of our light, then things become a little bit easier later on. So we'll start moving towards the shadows now and just going through our darkest swatch here and applying that in again because we've done a lot of blending and just paying special attention to where our darkest area is. So just blending that in nicely. Now, we've got an awful lot of color here on our shadow side in our swatches. And we're going to find that in most instances, this is where all the interesting stuff happens in our object. The light side in our secondary light source here doesn't really have much variation in color, but what we're going to find is that we're going to get all these reflective colors that are now bouncing back in to our shadow side. So we've got these reddish colors which are coming from our secondary light source. They're just filtering their way in through that direction, but we've also got light that's bouncing off the table, as well. Got that yellow surface, which is going to bounce off into that san colored ball, that cyan colored shadow side, and that's going to start to shift things towards more desaturated greens. So you can start to see here how we suddenly have a whole lot of interesting things happening in the shadow side. You'll see this in a lot of artworks that all the interesting colors are usually happening in the shadows. You'll have light reflecting back into that shadow side from the environment, from the sky above, from the ground below, everything around it. We have to remember that everything that receives light itself becomes a source of light. So if we've got some dark, shadowy areas and there's a whole bunch of different objects or things around it, they're all going to start reflecting light, and all that color is going to start spilling over mostly or most obviously into the shadows, we are going to get spillover happening in other areas, too. So it's not just exclusive to the shadows where that color shift happens. If you look at all the great artworks, there's a surprising amount of color that's happening in the darker areas. Makes things look really interesting. If we didn't have those colors spilling over and shifting around the hue, the saturation, and even the luminosity, because we are getting some value shifts as well in our shadow side. The closer the shadow is towards the table, the more it's picking up that reflected light from the table. But if we didn't have those changes, our shadows would look quite boring. I like to think of shadows as being the secret source to a really good composition. As mentioned, the primary light source is usually not going to give us many interesting shifts in color. And so it gives us the opportunity with the shadows to really do some interesting and even some dramatic things to make that whole composition really, really pop. So take advantage of all of those really cool reflections that are happening. From our primary secondary light sources or anything in the environment. So just going over the shadow side again and just really blending in the darker areas and taking the time to layer everything in. And working in layers is the best way to approach this, whether you're working practically with paints or pencils, watercolors, whatever it might be or if you're working in digital software as well. It's going to give us far more control if we break everything up into specific sections and then layer each one on top of each other. And that's going to stand true whether we're doing something simple like a ball like this or if we're doing something a bit more complicated like a portrait, which is what we're going to show next. We're going to take a look at a little bit of a time lapse image now of a fun little project, fun little side project that you're free to work on as well, where we'll take the exact same concepts of having multiple light sources and applying it to something a little bit more sophisticated. So this might do us now for our ball, and we'll move on to our next demonstration. 6. Black Widow Demo - Light and Shadow Shapes: Okay, now into something a little bit more fun and sophisticated. I've taken a picture of one of my hot toys figures of Black Widow, and we're going to do a little bit of a portrait of her. There's the sketch right there. That's the background tone that we're going to have, and these are the swatches. I've broken up each area individually into their own respective swatches, and we're going to paint these in one by one. So we've got our first set of colors up here, which are going to be the light sided swatches here for the hair, the face, and for the costume. And that's for our primary source of light and our secondary source of light coming from behind using this series of red swatches here that's going to come in this area, like so and finally, a third set of swatches for our third light source, which is coming up from below. So three different light sources I've set up for our portrait, and we're all ready to go here. So I've got an intense light sauce coming from the top right, the reddish light source coming from behind, and that's filtering through quite nicely. Makes for quite dramatic shadows, as we'll see as we go along. And we've got the greenish light source which is coming up from below. Now, this is not going to be really a demonstration on portraiture or accuracy or character design or anything like that. This is just going to be a more refined version of what was seen in the last demonstration. And so we're going to follow along with a very similar process to that one. So starting with those deep shadowy areas, but this time, just thinking about the more sophisticated shapes that we can see here. There's a sort of squarish part where her neck is sort of changes down to a pointy triangular area here, really asking myself as I'm painting this. Well, what shapes do I see and trying to simplify them as much as possible? It's going to be the big challenge that we've got when we start to do something a bit more complicated in its structure. It's very easy to get lost with all the dynamic twists and turns and sharp angles that all these different areas can start to produce. But we just need to take our time and just ask ourselves questions like, What shape does this look like? This area here over where her hair is? Well, it's pretty rectangular in its shape. So the more questions we ask like that of ourselves about what we see in the reference images, the easier things start to become, but it does take a lot of practice because we've got a bad habit, especially if we're beginners, of trying to do all those details straight away. But we have to learn first to simplify everything. And one of the best things that we can do to help us out there is to actually just blur our eyes. If we blur our eyes or squint our eyes, it knocks out a lot of those details, and what we're usually left with are just the more simplified shapes. So that's the shadowy areas more or less done for now. Let's move on to doing the facial parts and just mapping out that light side of the face and just taking note of where those twists and turns are in relation to where the shadow side begins, getting that nice flat color in that's the forehead done. Now moving on to the cheek area, getting that in, as well. Again, just keeping it nice and simple at the moment and not worrying about the ugly phase that the artwork inevitably goes through. Every artwork goes through that phase where you're looking at it and you're just thinking to yourself, well, this is just not coming together. And how's this ever going to look like anything? But building up in layers, as was mentioned in the last video, is really the key. So we've got to sort of resist the urge to start jumping into all those more refined things and go through that really ugly phase that every artwork goes through. It's like any type of building really. There's all sorts of rubble around when you start building a house. There's bits of broken timber everywhere. There's bricks thrown every which way. But eventually it turns into a house, and we want to do the same thing with our art. So I'm just starting to put the midtones in. Now, I haven't put any of that local color in the nose just yet. And sometimes you might find that you want to build up areas a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time, rather, just to get a feel for things. And right now I'm feeling like I need a little bit of that mid tone in just to give me a sense of the direction that it's going and whether I'm on the right path. So getting that foundation is important, that initial foundation, but we also want to have a little bit of flexibility, as well. If we need to start adding in a little bit of that mid tone to just help us see where the finish line is, it's just going to make the process a little bit easier. So rules are meant to be broken sometimes. We don't have to be super strict with our layering. We just have to keep in mind where exactly we are in that process. And now I want to start putting in that local color for the nose because I feel like things have a little bit more structure to it at the moment. So she's coming along quite nicely and just adding a little bit more of that mid tone in around the edge, following that around like so. Now, the other thing you want to do is to resist the urge to overblend at this stage. This is what you'd usually refer to as the blocking in stage. And it's sort of similar to how a sculptor would start to carve off areas of marble or clay or whatever he's working with. We're kind of doing the equivalent to that in a painting format. 7. Secondary Light and Shadow Colour: So that's a pretty good start for the light side of the face. So what I might start to do now is move over from the primary light source to the secondary light source. They are very bright red color, very saturated red. I'll just select the correct swatch here, the more vibrant one. There we go. That's right. And I'll start painting that want to do the exact same thing that we did with the shadows is try to look for those shapes here. It's a little bit more obvious with the light side, but the primary light source of where the shapes are. But with this secondary light source, things are scattered around a little bit more. And it's made a little bit more difficult by the fact that it's hair. So you've got all these little gaps in between the hair clumps getting different levels of that saturated light coming through. But like what I mentioned earlier, if we blur our eyes, or if we're working in the computer, if we're working in Photoshop or something, we can blur our image using one of the blur tools there. We do that, we can cancel out a lot of those details again. And start to paint in those areas that we see. So we've got a sort of C shaped curve here, a couple of C shaped curves down the bottom here. This isn't natural hair, of course. This is a doll's hair, so it's not really going to behave in the way than it normally would that we'd normally expect. But we're not really concerned with that too much. So again, that really deep red color here and just keeping things to a very simple color range as well, there is the temptation, again, that we usually have where we try to do a little bit too much where we'll start to add in more colors than what we actually need. Generally speaking, each color grouping rarely needs more than three colors. Once we start to add more than that, it starts to become a little bit more messy, and it then starts to become very easy to lose control because this is just one area of color that we've got. And if we can try to make things as easy as possible for us, that makes the job go a lot quicker. We've already got a bunch of different areas with their own set of colors that we have to worry about, and it just complicates things a lot more if we start adding extra colors in between that we don't actually need. Could we maybe have a fourth color with our red light here, a more ma gentish color that fits somewhere between our shadowy color and our mid tone color here, possibly, but it's not really going to benefit us too much. So we just want to keep things to a minimum. Now, our secondary light source here is coming together nicely. We've got those nice vibrant areas down below, some nice reddish hues. But what's going to happen now is that red light is going to scatter through into our shadows. So if we just grab a little bit of the skin tone and a little bit of our darker red tone here and mix that together, we're going to find that this is roughly what our shadow color is going to be. And if you're saying to yourself, this looks a lot more vibrant than what I was expecting the shadow color to be. But if you were to grab the color picker tool in Photoshop or Procreate or whatever digital painting app you're working with, you'll find that the shadows are actually quite reddish in their tones. It's that secondary light source filtering through. And that's great for us because it starts to make the shadows look really good. If we were to just make this sort of a dull, neutral gray color, the image will still work. As long as our values are strong enough, it's not really going to matter too much what the colors actually are. But that little bit more saturation just takes it to another level. What we think of usually as something that looks gray is actually a lot more colorful than what we realize, as grays are usually just slightly desaturated reds or yellows or blues or greens, whatever the color might be. We perceive them as being grays, but they're not a mix of 50, 50 black and white. Usually just a very desaturated color of some sort. So we want to keep that thinking in mind with our own shadows and our own neutrals, as well. We can use those grays, if we want, that's straight, black and white. It's a creative choice. I don't agree with the idea that you shouldn't use just straight black or white. But we want that little bit extra life into our images, then working within that more neutral area of neutral colors as opposed to black and white is going to take things to, as we said, another level. Gives a little bit more believability, which is a little bit ironic considering we're painting a toy in this demonstration. So I'm just painting in a little bit of the core shadow now around the nose, and you'll be surprised how much that starts to bring three dimensionality to the image. What was something that was very flat and two dimensional with its colors now starts to have a little bit more form to it, and we'll refine that as we go along. 8. Tertiary Light: So I'm going to start moving on now to the third light source. It's the greenish light sauce that's coming from below. Now I'm going to have to be a little bit subtle with this because it's very easy to start to overdo things with this third light source. There is a little bit of highlighted area in this greenish light, but we have to make sure that it doesn't get as bright in its highest values in relation to our secondary light source. So just a little bit brighter here in the cheek, it's going to be a little bit brighter in and around the mouth, as well. What we'll find is that if we actually compare our brightest values with each of our colored areas, we're going to find that they're very much far apart from each other on the value scale. The brightest part on our green light source from below here, the lightest value there is probably about equal to the mid tones for the skin, but it's probably not even that bright. So it's all about just keeping an eye on what each light source is doing. We need to think of them as well, I like to think of them as being characters in the story, really. It's a little bit of a silly way to think of it, I suppose, but got our primary light source, which is the lead character. We've got a series of supporting characters. So now just working on that underside of the eye socket, making sure we've got the light peeking up through there. We have to also think about where exactly are things hitting from this light source that's coming from below. We're going to hit the underside of the nose, the underside of the eye socket, underside of where the mouth is as well. And all the time just asking myself, what shapes is this third light source creating on our figure? Diamond shape under the eyes, rectangular shape under the nose, a little bit of a C shape where the mouth is. We don't want to think of this as a head, as hair, as a costume. We want to think of everything as being shapes and forms. What does this shape look like? What does this form look like? We're not painting a head, we're not painting anatomy, we've never done that and we're never going to do that. All we're doing is a concept that we have complete control over. So just doing a little bit of refinement with the eye here, just getting a little bit of those foundations in place. Again, not worrying too much about details. The highlight we'll worry about right at the end. It's always tempting to do that highlight right here and now, but we've got to be a little bit patient with ourselves. The details are kind of like the fun part of painting and illustrating. It's what we really want to jump into. I like to think of it as the dessert. But unfortunately, we've got to eat our vegetables first. Dessert comes later. But it's super tempting to just jump into those details because they really are the fun parts. It's sort of where you start to see the illustration or the painting come together. The cool little wisps of hair and little wrinkles and folds of skin here and there, the eyelashes or whatever it might be or as I just said, the highlights, as well. Those are like the final little touches the little bits of garnish on top of everything. But we've got to do this underlying work first. So just doing the mouth now and just using the colors that we've got. No need here to start creating an entirely new swatch. We've got enough colors to work with that we can just use what we've got. We still need to have unity with our colors. This range of colors here really only spans from the greens to the oranges. So it's not a huge range. We don't have any blues or cyans or magentas. So it's a very limited palette, but also very harmonious palette, as well. We got a lot of greens and reds here, and they tend to work well together because they're complimentary or near complimentary colors. So that's the other thing we have to think about when we start using multiple light sources is, how do we get them all to work together as a team? If we start having too many different colors, it's going to start to make things a little bit more chaotic. It's not that we can't make all those different colored lights work together, but we have to be a lot more careful with how we get them to unify together. If everything is just sort of bright greens and reds and magentas, then it's going to turn into a little bit of a rainbow mess. And probably the best way to unify things is to think of the composition in terms of temperature. Is it an overall cool color scheme or is it an overall warm color scheme? Then just make your adjustments to your colors accordingly based on that temperature. 9. Primary Light for the Hair: Now adding in that lighter swatch now really starts to bring out the three dimensionality a lot more slowly but surely getting there. So just painting that across the forehead. And then on to the nose. Noses can be a little bit tricky sometimes because they protrude out from the face. A lot of the facial features are actually relatively flat. So they catch the light in a very linear way. The noses, they protrude out, so they start to catch the light a little bit differently. So the noses tend to be a little bit more challenging, especially if it's more of a front on pose. If with the head straight towards us, nose actually becomes a very challenging thing to get looking right because it's protruding out and got to get the depth and the fore shortening correct. And it's a lot more challenging from a front on pose. Three quarter pose is a little bit more easier to do. So it's just going to be about thinking about the positioning of things because we've got the head as a whole that's capturing the light in a certain way, but we've got all these secondary facial features which are also going to be reacting to the light in their own way. They're going to be in slightly different positions, things will be protruding out or receding in. So it starts to become a little bit more complicated here. But again, we just need to think of things in terms of simple shapes, simple forms, and also thinking about how light might be bouncing off all of these features. So that left eye socket that I'm working on now, that's going to be illuminated by the reflective light coming back from her cheek. And it's also going to shift the color as well a little bit. We are getting that third light source bouncing up from below. But that greenish light source is not going to really show up too much on her left eye compared to her right eye, if at all. That green bounce light is just too weak to reach all the way under there. So the reflections that we're going to see under that left eye socket are mostly going to come from where the light is hitting her left cheek. But we also have to give ourselves room to play with, too. We don't necessarily have to be 100% accurate in terms of the colors. If we feel as if adding that greenish light on her left eye socket is going to result in a better image, then we're better off doing that than trying to be 100% accurate. So we got to give ourselves some room to play around with here, as long as we're adhering to the ideas of primary light sources, secondary light sources, and reflective light sources, as long as we're keeping that in mind, we've got a lot of room to play around with. As long as we've got a good set of values and value ranges, and as long as we've got a good order of how our lights are placed in relation to each other, what their intensities are, then the colors really aren't going to matter all that much. So we want to give ourselves some wiggle room here and to be able to explore ideas which might result in a better image. That includes outdoor images as well, not just the ones that we set up with their own lighting conditions. Outside images allows us to have all sorts of cool options. We've got the sunlight, of course. We've got the light coming down from the sky as well. Scatters a nice blue filter over everything. And all that light will bounce off the surfaces of the surrounding environment, of pavements, of the ground of trees, grass, water, even, all sorts of cool things that we can use to our advantage. That's if it's a really bright day. If it's an overcast day as well, it's going to give us other options to play around with. Overcast days are going to diffuse things quite substantially. We're not going to get these hard shadows. And things also tend to be a little bit more desaturated, as well, which gives us the opportunity to play around with those more neutral color tones. So we want to explore not just the vibrant colors with our lighting, but also those grays and those earthy tones as well, blocking in the shadow of the hair. There's some light red light areas peeking through down the bottom there that I'll worry about later on. It doesn't really matter too much if we over block things. We can always layer things on top. In fact, in many instances, we're better off blocking out too much and then painting it over the top than trying to do all those details in straightaway. So again, just trying to keep things nice and simple as we paint along and gradually build things up. Layer by layer. We want to work big to small. That's the case for not just painting with light, but anything to do with art in general. We want to start with the biggest, most obvious ideas first, biggest, most obvious shapes and forms, and then gradually add in smaller, more sophisticated secondary shapes and forms until we get to the point where there's nothing else left to draw in other than that little speck of highlight right at the end. I always like to think of the highlight as the final piece of the puzzle. 10. Painting 3-Dimensionally: So just thinking about things in simple shapes and forms, but moving the brush around three dimensionally, which sounds a little bit strange because we are working with a flat tooty surface. But as I'm moving the brush around this hair at the moment, these highlights of the hair, I am thinking about moving my hand around to the back of the head. And that's going to be one of the challenges that we've got with painting two dimensionally, is getting that sense that we are moving our brush across the surface of this head. These little strokes here going across the hair, that they're coming towards me. Coming towards us as the viewer, making sure that forehead feels rounded, moving the brush in a way where I'm pretending almost like I'm moving it across that rounded surface. And if we can get that idea in our head as we are painting or drawing or illustrating whatever medium we're using, it's going to help develop a sense of form in our image. If we don't think about moving the brushes or the pencils across the surface in a way that feels real to us, then it's not really going to come across very authentic in the artwork. And one thing you can do to help envision what that should feel like is to run your finger across different surfaces for real. So if you've got a ball in front of you, run your hand across that ball, get a sense of what that roundness feels like, and keep a mental image of what that feels like. And when you start to paint, have that feeling in mind. It's going to take a little bit of practice. But if you can run your hand enough across that rounded surface or that box or that cylinder, when it comes to drawing those objects onto the page, things are going to feel a lot more authentic. We want our brush strokes to work with the roundness of that ball or with the straightness of that box or that cylinder. We want that hair to feel like it's wrapping around to the back. We need to learn to think three dimensionally. This head for all intents and purposes, as I'm drawing it, has a back side to it. It's got a far left side that I can't see, as well. I have to think about that as I'm painting in order to truly capture some sense of three dimensionality. 11. Core Shadow Refinement and Assignment: So I'm now just going to start to use this darker swatch and start rendering in that core shadow, that core shadow edge. And the core shadow, when we start to render this in, and you don't have to necessarily do this straightaway. This is something you can build up to later on. Things end up getting blended a lot, so you're probably going to have to go over it again anyway. But once we render it in, it really starts to make a difference. The core shadow, as far as I'm concerned, is the key component. It's not the light side, the dark side, the midtones, the shadows, the highlights, it's that core shadow. And it's usually fairly obvious, but it can also be a little bit subtle, too, depending on the strength of the two light sources. It starts to really make that three dimensionality come out. So if there's something about the image that you're working on with its form that doesn't feel quite right, something feels a little bit flat or just isn't working in the way that you envisioned it, there's probably a good chance that there's something wrong with the core shadow or core shadow edge, whatever you want to refer to it as. But once you start to render it in place, it really starts to make things look a lot better. I know for the longest period of time, I had that issue where my forms weren't working all that well. And it was until it was pointed out to me that my core shadows weren't very good that I solved the problem. So spend a little bit of time at the beginning before you do any type of coloring or rendering, mapping out your core shadows, working out where they're going to go and planning ahead to make them nice and dark to create that form and then just paint over the top of that. Like I said, it's sort of like coloring in between the lines, really. It's a very simplistic way of looking at it, but it's sort of what it is. We're just sort of mapping out the areas of color and just painting in accordingly. So just a regular old coloring book, no different from what we used to do as children, really. So on to the home stretch now with her suit, working in some of the triangular shapes here for the slightly lighter area. I'm not going to worry too much about blending things for this lesson. This is just a quick sketch. So if you want to do your own version of this for your assignment, by all means, give it a shot. I wouldn't recommend spending too much time on this because this isn't really about portraiture or accuracy or anything like that. That's a different class for a different time. This is really just about trying to create a process for ourselves to make the job a lot easier for us. And that process is about working out what's our hierarchy of light? Where's the light coming from? And how do they all relate to each other? And you can start with just the simple ball exercise first. If you're a beginner, if you're a little bit more intermediate and you want to challenge, you want to do something a little bit fun as well. Then by all means, give this a go too. The sketch for this, the underlying sketch will be available in the class notes, where you can sketch your own up as well, alongside the reference images. And I'll put in a couple of different reference images to try out too. But if you want something a little bit more exciting than just a regular old ball or box or cylinder, then by all means, give this a shot. But hopefully, this lesson has given you a little bit of an idea of how to create for yourself a little bit of an assembly line in order to create your images. An assembly line feels like it's the wrong type of phrase to use for art. We think about art, we think about expression and cool ideas and everything like that. Anything like assembly lines or processes usually frowned upon because art is supposed to be expressive. But if we've got some type of linear approach that we can come to, it means that if we come across errors or mistakes along the way, we can always revert back to a specific point where we were more in control. And if we do things just randomly with no structure in place, yeah, we might get there in the end eventually, but we may end up taking the long way around just to get there. So we want to be able to have an idea of how to structure our light or multiple lights in a way where we get the best result in the quickest way possible. And the more we do it, the more it becomes second nature to us. And that's ultimately what we want to be able to do. We want to be able to just jump right in to the next job that we're doing, the next commission job or just even our own little side project that we're working on and be confident that any hurdles along the way we can overcome. We ask the right questions, if we structure things out in the right way, if we have everything laid out for us in a nice orderly fashion, then we can still have all the expression that we want. So this was about 30 minutes sketch in total. And I did spend a little bit of time afterwards just doing a bit more refinement to the rest of the image, just for my own personal tastes. And so what I'll do is I'll flash that up on the screen now to show what the finished result is reasonably happy with this. So give this a shot yourself. Again, don't spend too much time on your own sketch here. This is just an exercise. We're not looking for renaissance style finished work here for this class. So do your own little black widow sketch. Post it in the class project section to get some feedback. Do your best, and I'll see you in the next lesson.