Improve Your Art with Better Shadows

hey everyone cynics here today I'm going to try and improve your art skills by giving you three tips about drawing and painting shadows these are based on common mistakes that I see all the time but they are also just a helpful checklist that you can keep in mind every time you're drawing and painting diving right into it number one focuses on detail so let's do a quick test I'm going to draw a quick stylized face with a line right down the middle implying there is a shadow covering exactly one half of the face now without adding any value which side of the face is in shadow hopefully you're saying the one on the right why because it has less detail another quick test here to demonstrate again by eliminating detail entirely in certain areas and in furs in our brain that these are in shadow especially when we know there should be detail there I'll make a slightly fancier face drawing now to really discuss this now I could just add a shadow to this without any regard to the wine art and that looks okay but we want to really improve our skills so let's think about this in a more painterly way and remove most of the detail that's in the shadows now you could debate over which looks better but this is mainly an exercise to train our brains into becoming more painterly and adaptive and yes being painterly is very fancy so let's break down the key fundamentals going on here human vision consists of light rays bouncing off objects and into our eyes the less light bouncing off of something the less visual information we will receive from it therefore less light means less details now to be fair because of bounced light this wouldn't mean that there are no details but art is about enhancing various aspects of vision such as the inner plays of cool and warm tones the science of lighting all that stuff it's up to the artist to enhance these theories and make them a little more fancy than they are in real life and for the record I am leaving touches of ambient occlusion in a lot of these shadows just a bit for science anyway there is at least one important exception to be aware of and that revolves around dynamic range you camera nerds will probably be perking up right now because you know what I'm talking about but just a quick and ugly explanation have you ever walked into a dark room and not been able to see anything at least maybe for a few minutes and then your eyes adjust and suddenly you can start making out details in the darkness but oh no someone came in and turned on a bright light and your ability to see in the light is completely blown out and everything is pure white well this ability to see details and either just the light or just a dark is what you might refer to as a shift in the dynamic range technically it's just the dilating of your pupils but it's a similar effect and it's a much bigger problem with cameras anyway if you did have to do a very dark scene with a bright light being introduced on the character or whatever you could represent that with a lack of detail in the light area and details that only exist in the shadows in some sense they're not even really shadows at that point you can think about that on your own okay I talked about that part a little bit too much so let's actually paint out this face a bit we'll zoom through this at maximum speed to get a rough pass on this painting we're not worried too much I'll try to fix up my skewed leaning proportions a bit they're really pretty bad I really should have flipped the canvas earlier on but oh well anyway as fun as it is to implement these painterly shadow ideas into your line art these concepts are extremely important when you get to actual painting and I'll just keep it completely honest again a face wasn't necessarily the best place to demonstrate this idea we are very accustomed to seeing faces in a pretty high dynamic range especially in a portrait shot but regardless I guarantee this concept of painting far less detail into your shadow areas will make your larger illustrations and environment pieces and really all of your paintings to start to come to life you can focus a bit or on just ambient occlusion and let those details just sink away into the shadows you know who does a really good job at this well most professionals do but my friend Dylan Chu the Chad comes to mind his life drawings tend to let the shadows just soak up all the details anyway it's really going to start bringing you amazing results when the shadows of separate objects and pieces start merging together which brings us to our second tip shapes let's be realistic we're often not going to have the foresight to plan our shadows into our initial sketches and doodles of faces or characters it's not completely a bad thing because it at least allows us to have full adjustable control over where the lighting actually goes you get to make a whole new art piece on top of your previous art piece by trying to figure out the most aesthetically interesting shapes you can create with your shadows and shadows really are great for shape design you can approach them like a pure graphic element a stylish second skin to be placed on top of the form famously you might have heard of such ideas as the Rembrandt triangle which I spelled wrong here for some reason but Rembrandt was notable for often placing the lighting in such a way that the light would touch the further cheekbone and form a simple triangular shape it's a good graphic design trying to create simplified and appealing shapes now if you're just trying to show an innocent or lovely face you might find that you should focus on shadows that only frame the outside of the face and don't create too many lines or shapes that might interrupt the simple rounded features however if you're feeling like having some fun you can get ambitious with your shadows and employ large chunky shadows to bring forth all sorts of fun graphic shapes I can't stress it enough you should always be treating them as design elements and focus on the keys of good shape design and I still haven't made a video on that so just use your imagination for now know I can let you know at least that shapes should be minimal with large simple obtuse angles which make them very inviting so combine things wherever you can and avoid thin lines simplification is always key to shape designs so find a flow to the shapes that doesn't leave little stranded pieces in chaos everywhere also throw in some big medium small wherever you can if you're feeling confident you can even outline the new shadows and start taking details out of the shadow shapes you created relating to both of these first two tips part of this shape stuff also gets into combining shadow shapes so let's do more combining I'll doodle a dumb vehicle design here and while I do that my mind jerks back to the words of a wonderful watercolor artist who mentioned that a car and its shadow should always be looked upon as a singular shape the shadow was not some separate entity that existed outside of the car no from a painter standpoint seeing the world and only color and value the shadow of a car is just as much a part of the car as the wheels are in respect to that I often like to ignore ambient occlusion and let the wheels of a vehicle melt straight into the shadow without too much line or detail keeping them apart it's a very minor abstraction of reality but as artists we crave abstraction of reality so plants and foliage are always a source of chaos for a lot of paintings and a lot of artists starting out some people try to focus on every leaf and shadow but once again an artist this year to just distill things down so combine and simplify those bushes into Spears with crazy textures group as much into one single shadow shape as you can and just when you think you've done too much March that shadow into the ground plane as well we are trying to evolve past the lines that separate objects in our minds all we want to see are the lines that separate giant ranges of value and color instead alright let's come back down to reality a little bit topic number three is also a good one color another very simple concept that you might be overlooking simply because you never considered the most basic rule of all in all get to that role in a second but first I'm going to paint a white surface here in a red room now I'm going to add a white ball on this white surface and for fun let's add a shadow as well look at that I even combined my shadow shapes like a true painter now go ahead and guess what I did wrong I'm sure plenty of you are onto my tricks but let's take it a step further right now it would seem from my painting that there is a direct spotlight shining on our ball here hmm we didn't really think much about ambient light so let's just turn off that spotlight in this red room with no direct light on our ball it would certainly be a lot darker but it would also be getting lit from all of that red light bouncing off those bright red walls everywhere to be fair I should have made the room darker it's pretty unrealistic as it is but bear with me I'm lazy so our white ball is now just dimly lit by all that ambient red light now let's turn that spotlight back on obviously the dark parts wouldn't change light is purely additive so we can just bring all of our white where the spotlight is hitting and it should be done all right this is all starting to sound very patronizing so let's just spit out the basic rule that I alluded to at the start this shadow color is the ambient color so what color should your shadow be well whatever the ambient color of your setting is along with maybe some bounce light factored in I want you guys to tell yourself that every time you ever paint a shadow the shadow color is your ambient light color let's do a quick demo with a cube R you say outdoors under a blue sky then blue shadows are you in a boring colorless warehouse then you can have your gray shadows are you in a warm indoor environment warm shadows here's a curve ball outdoors but sitting on the grass while still a blue cast shadow but bounce some green up onto that cue for a little bit of fun just please please stop putting grey shadows on everything and colors are subtle but let's keep things from getting too lifeless and once again art is about enhancing the signs of reality so identify your ambient light and crank it up a bit it can be pretty fun alright I'm wrapping it up so those are my three tips for improving your shadows and hopefully improving your art I hope you guys enjoyed the video and I'll try to be back with another one soon I would like to thank you all so much for watching and of course give the biggest love to my patreon supporters or are my little tether keeping me friend drifting off into the depths of space see everyone

Channel: Sinix Design

Views: 1,941,429

Keywords: art tutorial, color, lighting, shadows, ambient occlusion, ambience, bounced, painter, painting, drawing, art school, lesson, shadow shapes, shape design, graphic design, tips, tutorial, how to, commentary, tricks, artist, better

Id: ZJkIaMECW6c

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 05 2019