A brief guide to constructive figure drawing - part 2 - lighting and form

This is a direct followup from the last introductory post, dealing specifically with the first proposition I put forth:

How to render basic forms properly in terms of light and shadow

This is the easiest part, but it will still take some time to learn to do really well. I used to groan when I'd see these - I mean come on - this is simple stuff, right? We all know how to do it. Right? Well, if you really do then you're well on your way already. But most art students actually don't know it nearly as well as they assume they do.

Students think that just because they've seen the basic form shading exercises many times and read about how it's done that they already know how to do it. They're usually wrong. Understanding how to do it is only the first step - You don't actually know it until you can draw it - and draw it well. You should do these exercises every so often to gauge your progress.

Here are some decent online tutorials:

Drawing Lesson - A Theory of Light and Shade

Starting to Draw: Light and Shadow

.. And videos :

Start off by copying exercises you find online. But the goal is to eventually be able to draw it entirely from the imagination and be able to place the light source anywhere. The cast shadows are important too - they help to define where the forms are in relation to each other and to the environment. A cast shadow grounds an object solidly.

When you've studied these lighting principles it's also extremely helpful to set up little still lifes and draw them, using objects similar to the basic forms, maybe eggs, apples, blocks, whatever you can find. Try to only use one light source and switch off other lights, close window shades, eliminate extra light as much as you can to simplify the lighting. 

An important concept you'll encounter when doing these is the core shadow - the core of a shadow, or the darkest part of the shadow, which lies between the lighted plane and a dark plane (I'll be covering planes in depth soon). Also, and a necessary partner to the core shadow - reflected light or bounce light. 

You can really see it here in Tintoretto's drawing : 

One important thing to take careful note of (and always keep this firmly in mind whenever you're drawing or painting - it's one of the vital keys) - reflected light is never as strong as direct light. Note in the drawing above you can clearly see which planes are lit directly and which are receiving only reflected bounce light. You should never put any tone into a shadow area that approaches being as bright as even the darkest tone in the lighted area (the halftones). This cannot be stated strongly enough - it's one of the essential principles used by the masters to simplify drawings and paintings so they're easily readable. In fact this is why the light tones are called halftones - it's a reminder. Divide the value scale into two separate sections - darks and lights - in fact it's best if you leave a gap - for example use values 1-4 in light and 6-9 in dark. No 5 at all in the drawing. This helps to really clarify exactly what is light and what is shadow.

Tintoretto's drawing perfectly illustrates the real importance of learning to light basic forms - when you understand it then you can light more complex forms and make them look solid and real. There are a few other things he's doing here that I'll be discussing in the next followup too, that help to make the drawing clearly understandable. And after a couple more posts you'll really see how all this stuff ties together into an amazing system.

Ok, that's it for #1 rendering basic forms properly in terms of light and shadow - the other 2 entries are about #2, the forms of the figure and how they relate to each other. Be there or be square! 

A brief guide to constructive figure drawing - part 1 - introduction

Figure Drawing self-education

This is a brief guide to what you need to learn if you want to be able to draw/paint figures entirely from the imagination or be able to freely modify your reference as you go (aka Constructive Drawing, as opposed to Direct Drawing). I'm not teaching those things here, just introducing what they are - to  learn them get books on figure drawing and anatomy or take classes on those subjects. This guide is specifically about what is sometimes called the Form Factor - in other words, how light and shadow work to reveal form.


There are only 2 simple things you need to learn (simple, but not easy):

1) How to render form realistically in terms of light and shadow

2) The forms of the human body and how they relate to each other

In the followup posts I'll go into greater detail about these 2 categories.

____________________________

About this guide -

I'm concentrating on lighting and shadow and how to use them to depict convincing FORM, covering those areas that I personally found vitally important in my own learning, and I don't pretend to cover everything. For instance I'm leaving out perspective and gesture, which are super important. Every student should definitely learn them! 

My (biased) book recommendations -

Personally I did most of my studies from books by Burne Hogarth and Robert Beverly Hale, both of whom I consider excellent teachers on the subjects. Andrew Loomis is another, though I know a lot less about his books. I can also recommend Jack Hamm's Drawing the Head and Figure. And I'm sure there are more as well. But I want to point out one that I think makes a surprisingly good introduction to all this stuff - How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. It's quite rightly considered a classic, and it seems to be largely a condensation of many of Hogarth's concepts but presented in a way that's much more accessible to the beginner. I heartily recommend starting with it and then moving on to others, and saving Robert Beverly Hale for last as I consider it more advanced. Hale recommends choosing one set of books written by the same author and learning them backwards and forwards, and then get ahold of every  other book on the subject that you find, because each author presents the same material in a different way, and some cover a little ground that others don't. Then you just need to skim the other books to find those nuggets of wisdom you haven't already learned and study them.

What you'll get from these books is a unified system that allows you to draw and paint realistically without needing a model or reference. This system has been taught to art students from the Renaissance on - up until sometime in the mid to late 20th century when art education in most schools switched to "just draw what you feeeel". For this reason, it's usually recommended any serious art student get books written in the 40's or earlier, or at least by artists trained then (Loomis, Hogarth, Hale, Hamm, and many others).

Ok, stay tuned folks - followup posts to come.

Gestures - inspired by Stanchfield

From Croquis Cafe.

Notes gathered from Conceptart

Composition: don't even bother with details, just get a big brush and paint the light and shadow areas, zoom out and see if it works. If it does, then star adding detail.

Longbow Restrung

Looking back @ 2013, and going forward

This is a screenshot of my Flickr gallery page, showing the pieces I've completed in 2013 (so far - might get 1 or 2 more in yet). Looking at them all together like this several things become apparent :

1) The most recent 2 (lower right corner) stand out because the light planes are much lighter than those of the earlier paintings. I've also created a good strong separation between halftones and shadow tones in both of these (I mentioned this in the last post as well).

But I didn't mention the rest of these factors.

2) The last 2 also look better in color terms. Where I've lightened the light planes they have less color saturation, there's more white blended in. This looks a bit more realistic and less cartoonish. 

3) In the last one (Charmaine, lower right) I also used color with more facility. Keeping to the carefully controlled values, I freely dropped in different colors - reds, yellows, greens, each corresponding to a different value (so actually not 'freely' as I said). I did this using a Color layer, to change the hue of already existing values, and I changed the color in the color picker by only moving the cursor in the color bar on the side, not by moving the picker inside the square window, which would allow me to change the value (unless I was careful to only move it horizontally of course).

4) I want to move forward using this kind of approach for a while, but I want to get a bit more ambitious and start doing more complete scenes now - figure(s) in an environment rather than standing isolated against a black background. Lol - I didn't do that one on purpose - it's just that these pictures of MMA fighters were all taken in or near the octagon, with bright overhead lighting and a darkened audience area behind.

5) Besides these things I already mentioned I need to work on landscape and composition.

6) - oh yeah, and I also think it's time to do a few male fighters, to start to learn the differences between boys and girls (besides the obvious, obviously).

Charmaine

Notes :

Starting with my previous piece Ronda, I paid attention to maintaining a clear separation of shadow planes from halftones/highlights (light planes), which gives both of these much stronger solidity and clarity of form. I notice they also both have lighter light planes than my previous paintings, which now look muddied up to me because of it. 

I also noticed before starting on this one that I tend to shy away from greens in flesh tones, and it seems to be an important element in most paintings. So I made shadows green here, and it definitely helped. In fact the flesh tones here consist of purples (or somewhat cool reds you might say), yellows for highlights, and green for shadows. A pretty full set of colors. I normally tend toward mostly warms, with some purples for shadows.

Here's the value sketch before converting to color :