“Most of the time when we are painting, we get so overwhelmed with all the info, which is why practicing the lighting fundamentals beforehand will be beneficial for future work. This will be a pretty lengthy article, but it is pretty comprehensive in terms of necessary fundamentals.
Fundamental #1: Importance of the Plane
When painting and using light, you need to switch from the form build-up approach to thinking about the right plane structure to make the right lighting decisions.
If you can simplify the elements into the proper planes you will understand the structure better and you will be able to assign the right values (when lighting).
Fundamental #2: Light Properties
There are some consideration to make when thinking about lighting. I will try my best to explain some of properties and explain how the lights affect the values and colors of a scene.
Light-Shadow Ratio: The light-shadow ratio determines how much of a contrast there is between light and shadow. A higher contrast is created due to sunlight, and a lower contrast due to overcast weather for example. This is caused by different intensities in light.
Value Keys: Value keying is mainly a design technique used to adjust the value scale while maintaining the light-shadow ratio. Depending on the light situation we have a specific value key in the scene.
Value Compression: Value compression is needed, because we as painters can´t get the full range of light into our paintings. We need to decide, if we want to expose for the light side or shadow side and sacrifice the values on the other side
Light Color: The first thing to understand about light is that it constantly changes it´s wavelengths, therefore changing it´s color. To simplify the process just identify the light as a warm or cold light.
Shading Components
Fundamental #3: Light Set-up
Now that we know how values and colors and affected by light, let´s look at how to set up lighting situations. These lighting situations are always used, and can be divided into natural and artificial light:
Light Types: There are only 3 basic light types you need to know to light your scene. Key Light, Fill Light and Rim Light.
Light Sources: There are only so many light sources that exist. Knowing about them will help you identifying them in any given reference and use them creatively.
Global Illumination: The characteristics of global illumination is the use of bounced/reflected light. It is used to calculate where reflected light is coming from, so we know which planes receive what light in any given scene. You need to treat it as a diffuse light source. It is most effective when there are a lot of shadows.
Fundamental #4: Material Behaviour
Many Material renders disregard the properties of Light. The reason we have learned about light in the first place is to convey materials in different lighting conditions and make them congruent to the scene. Let´s look at the materials and how light interacts with different surfaces.
Learn how to think about shapes, value, color and edges and understand it to apply the knowledge of physics to adjust your values and colors. A proper artist knows both the mechanics of painting and of physics.”
For full explanations complete with image examples, go to the article.
Everything is done on SAI (CS6 for a bit of editing)
Let me show ya something quick:
Basically the trick is blending/how to blend colors. ALSO, dont use the blurr tool, blend within shades(it’s a bit difficult at first but you’ll get it)
My most used brush settings if you wanna give it a go:
I will do a more thorough walk through later on, but for now just give it a try!
nekonotaishou asked:What’s a good way to add shading to an animation in Flash?
Well, this is how I go about it. It’s a pretty simple technique that my pal and co-worker Marji taught me. I was kind of mind boggled that I had never tried this before, but once this knowledge was passed down to me I became a GOD!…
I made a walkthrough of my process for drawing faceted stones! Judging by the timestamps from the screenshots I took, drawing this one stone took an hour and three minutes, although I know I went and checked tumblr a couple times while I was working, so let’s just call it an hour.
Now MISCELLANEOUS NOTES
This walkthrough assumes you already know how to use layer masks, the clone stamp, and the lasso tool. There’s also one part where I didn’t label it, but I inverted the selection so I could keep my lines consistent. It’s in the third image.
Unfortunately I can’t really help with colour choice and the actual colouring of the pinwheel shape that makes up the back facets, but you can kind of see that I tended to colour with lines that cut across the facets and and kept the outer parts of the facets darker. It would probably be best to find a reference to work from!
This particular cut of stone is called the ‘brilliant’ cut.
There’s actually a lot of internal reflection business that goes on in a stone, but I elected to ingore all of it since at a distance you can’t really tell anyway.
now GO FORTH AND DAZZLE YOUR FRIENDS WITH YOUR SPARKLE
Since a bunch of people have been asking here’s a rough process gif of how I made the diner panel in ctc. It’s basically how I do all my backgrounds, hope it helps
Sorry for the lack of WIPs on this pic. Here are jpg’s of all the steps (with not-so-very-clear notes).
All the work was done in GIMP.
Wait what? A grayscale shade layer??? What layer option do you use though, let alone change the color successfully?
This is a really effective way to color, actually. I do it all the time. When you make shade layer, make sure you’re ONLY shading SHADOWS and basic diffusion — NOT object/material color values (like, just because the socks should be a dark color, you’re going to completely ignore that in the shading layer.) There are two ways to mix the shading afterward. You can place the shading layer over the flats layer then set the shading to Multiply, OR put the flats over the shading and set the flats to “Color” blending. Then, you just paint some small variances in hue to whichever layer you’ve set blending mode to.
This is a great way to color because it eliminates the need to mix new colors as you pass from one flat to another. It gets less of a painterly look, but in this type of art you’re not going for that anyway. Excellent for comics.
r
SO THAT’S HOW YOU DO IT
This is very similar to how I go about coloring as well. 🙂
using this when i get home
Holy flippin’ crap I have to try this now.
This is sad to admit but I’m learning more technique from tumblr than I am from art school
hank you, im really glad you like it! I usually use SAI to draw and Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 (yes its absolutely ancient i knooow) to add certain effects i cant quite recreate in SAI
to get that fuzzy effect, i have the entire image on one layer and duplicate it, changing the opacity of the copy to around 30-40%
then i hide the copy for a bit, and select the background. there, i apply the “diffuse” filter found right here:
the “lighten only” mode, creates a base to get that “scanned pencil lines” look which helps to make it look more like a screencap of an older anime.
(i found that this works best with clear lines and cell shading)
then, still on the background layer, i get a gaussian blur filter going, found over here:
a radius of 1-2 pixels blurs the whole deal out a little to make it look like its a good ol low quality screencap
then i go back to the other layer and, using the same gaussian blur filter but a radius of 15-20 pixels, get that foggy feel going!
this step is the most important as it creates that dreamy, foggy feeling which helps to make it look like ye olde animes
lastly, i clean up some highlights that might’ve gotten washed away by all the blurring, and we’re done!
of course you can always do more things like add a texture to make it a little grainy, or resize the canvas to fit the average dimensions for most old animes, or do something difficult and technical with the colors which i know nothing about, but i feel like this process is a pretty alright method to satisfy those ~ a e s t h e t i c ~ cravings!
(quick before/after)
i hope this helps, im sorry this turned out so long…..feel free to ask me to clarify if anything isnt clear!
typically these should be in every photoediting/drawing program like photoshop too if u guys are unsure c:
Inspiration Haven 