Lighting Principles for Digital Painting

Lighting Principles for Digital Painting

“Dear students, we have reached the end of the course and I hope that you feel like you have a better understanding of light and color now. We saw how to differentiate between soft and hard light, how to choose our exposure, according to the content of the image, how to light any painting from imagination, and put the finishing touches. I want to go over the steps you need to take to create your own illustration in different lighting situations, to serve as a guide for your project. Start your process by sketching a drawing with a simple character over different minimalistic backgrounds, but don’t include small details or complex shapes, as they will only slow you down in our exercise of learning how to apply light.

Once you have your drawing ready, paint your local colors making sure they aren’t too bright or too dark, as this will be the base on top of which all the different lighting scenarios will be painted. With the local colors ready, you can move onto your scenes, you’ll need to add the multiply layer, in which you’ll work on creating the lights. Finally, you must use the concepts of reflections and translucency to add details and volume. Pay close attention to where the light source is when painting reflections to position them accurately. I hope you will now go and experiment with this technique in your own paintings, there is no limit to what you can create with it as it works in a logical way and thus will apply to any situation if you do it correctly. Don’t hesitate to come back and watch the lessons again if you feel like something’s not working! ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Final Project This brings us to the end of the course. I hope I taught you what you needed in order to understand the basic principles of light. You should internalize how light behaves so that you can determine easily where light comes from and which are the light sources in your work. Before I say goodbye, I want you to go over the steps needed to create your own illustrations in different lighting situations. To begin, I want you to practice with basic shapes the key concepts of reflections, exposure and translucency. That way you'll discover by yourself what makes your paintings look re...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Lighting Principles for Digital Painting

• Level: Beginner
• 100% positive reviews (1365)
• 30956 students
• 4 units
• 15 lessons (2h 22m)
• 7 downloads

• Category

  Illustration

• Software

  Adobe Photoshop

• Areas

  Digital Illustration, Digital Painting, Traditional illustration