Carving out the Light (and why "Shading" is deceiving)
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Jeremy Lipking |
In all the research I’ve done of many artists from across
the industries, there is one interesting coincidence when it comes to their process.
It’s fairly logical and most likely done subconsciously, though I will put it
in tangible terms in this post.
When I first started with art, a lot of tutorials would
mention you need to focus on “shading”. Shading was this magical process that
promises you a three dimensional image, which is often sold as making your
artwork “realistic”. Shading, as implied in the name, is simply adding the
shadows on an object. By the nature of adding the shadows, what isn’t in the
shadows are naturally lit.
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Jeremy Mann |
It took years before I realized there is a fundamental
problem with this approach. It’s not so much the actual process that’s the
problem but it’s the way it teaches people how to think about light.
For our eyes to be able to see anything, light must be
present. Science classes from all levels would have probably taught you that
vision occurs when light reflects off of objects and into our eyes. In an
environment void of light, it would just be pure darkness. Darkness is the true
neutral state, the absence of light as if it’s a blank canvas with nothing
happening.
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David Kassan |
As I might have hinted already, the logical approach is
actually the direct opposite of focusing on shades. Imagine your artwork as if
it started off in darkness and you’re painting the light. It might seem weird
given that a canvas, in the traditional sense, starts off as blank white. It
further justifies why master fine artists tends to put a tone of burnt sienna
or other neutral wash over the canvas to cover up the white.
Let me be clear that I am not saying you shouldn’t be
painting the shadows. Chances are, you are going to be adjusting the colours of
every part of your painting during the process, which will include the shades. I
am saying that it’s more intuitive to set your mentality based on what’s being
ADDED to the scene (adding light to darkness). If there’s a way to ensure your
artwork feels lit, it is important to first and foremost focus on the light and
what it does to a scene.
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David Kassan |
Traditional paintings have something digital paintings never
do; texture of the physical paint. There is a very common technique to paint
light which has been lost in the digital age. Generally, you’ll find that fine
artists would have much thicker paint on the lit areas than the shades. In
fact, you might find many paintings which leave the shades in a very thin wash.
The reason is quite simply it allows for the thick paint to pop out just like
how light causes an object to pop out. This is the most apparent case where an
artist is painting based on ADDITION; to literally have more paint present to
emulate the intensity of light. Would it make any sense if the shades were
heavily textured instead?
Just to clarify (as with every other blog), I am not in the
realm of telling people how to think. It is simply a recommendation of what seems
to work for many artists over hundreds of years. For myself, colours made sense
when I started to carve out what’s being lit rather than carve out what’s not
being lit.
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Justin Sweet |
Shading felt like a process of adding paint to what is logically a
case of subtraction in reality. I feel it should be something you do after you've established and resolved the lights. When you do that, the shadows have a point of reference to the lights, giving you a better perception on just how dark the shadows need to be. In a lot of cases, you might not even need to do much in the shadows at all! If you've noticed some of the images I've attached, you might find that the shadows tend to be left rough just as it's required.
If you have a mind that must wrap around the rational
like I do, perhaps this approach might suit you better!
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