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0:03
So it should come as no surprise that it also plays a huge role in shadow colors Okay, so this video is a direct continuation of my ambient light and ambient occlusion lesson Мы видели, как огни окружения играют огромную роль в теневых значениях We're about to go full speed ahead from there. So if you haven't seen it, check it out first Let's recall our quick light ray diagram We have the Sun a light ray comes from the sun hits the ground and bounces back up.
0:25
Oh yeah, and when these rays bounce they get progressively weaker. That information really helped us with our studies and breakdowns in lesson 1. But now we want to add color to the mix. So we've got to do a bit more analysis. Let's begin with the most fundamental aspect of how these reflected or bounced light rays interact with color. So let's redo this diagram with this green card here. When a light ray bounces off something, its color mixes with the color of that object!
0:51
Light rays inherit other colors throughout their lifespan. Now as for the exact balance of these interactions, don't worry we'll get there. For now let me just point out something obvious: the world contains a lot of different colored objects So you can imagine there's a whole lot of opportunity for many subtle colors to bounce around. Let's start with just the sun, and kind of simulate the lifespan of its light rays. And I want to remind you:
1:14
I'm only talking about color right now, not value. We'll bring value back into the conversation later. So the sun's rays come in nice and orderly and uniformly yellow like this. But when they bounce, the whole thing starts resembling the Wild West with colors coming and going from all angles and in all directions! And that was just the first bounce. These light rays will bounce again ... and again, and again - until they're simply too weak to be seen. And our little diagram here is becoming
1:41
pretty cluttered. Oh, and by the way, I haven't even put in the sky yet. The sky is a giant dome throwing blue ambient light down into the scene. Those light rays are weaker than the sun's, but they bounce too, and when they do, their blue color mixes with the colors of other objects. Yeah, I know, it's daunting. But don't despair, I have some good news! You would literally have to be a computer program to keep track of all those light rays.
2:04
In fact, we do have computer programs that do that: they're called rendering engines. I'll fire up a rendering engine in just a few minutes, but first let's take quick step into the land of color theory ... because something very important is happening here that I need to point out. So I've cropped in on our diagram. What I'm going to do is start sampling colors from these bounce light rays and
2:23
painting them into this little panel that I've made down below here. Now. I'm only sampling the mixed colors. I'm not sampling the direct sunlight rays or the direct sky light rays. Just the resulting mixtures that have occurred. In other words, our simulated reflected light. And I say 'simulated' because the way light rays actually mix in real life is, shall we say, more scientifically involved than this. But this approximation will still allow me to make some important observations.
2:51
Okay, the very first thing I want to point out, just aesthetically as I'm looking at all these ambient colors side by side, is that there is a pleasing effect to them. They feel harmonious. Or in other words, they just look like they belong together. That they have something in common that binds them. Which totally makes sense, right? They do have things in common! For example, the environment they all came from. Also the sun and sky light rays they all came from.
3:15
It's almost as though the environment and the light source are the parents and these resulting colors are the children. Let's bring in our color picker so we can examine these relationships under an artistic microscope. So please watch this box as I start sampling colors. And I need to remind you: I'm still only talking about color right now. Not values yet! Okay ... so I'll start here and I'll just scrub through again. Watch the color box as I do this.
3:39
Just kind of take general stock of what's happening. We'll go back to the beginning and just kind of run through this again.
3:47
Now I noticed two things happening here. The first is the colors the hues themselves were all over the map. It was totally unpredictable where each color would end up. We found colors everywhere. And the second thing I noticed has to do with the saturation. That is, the amount of color present. The saturation level was generally within this range of the color picker. So even though we were bouncing around like crazy finding different hues,
4:12
we were always within, you know, this kind of range in in here. And it's that aspect - this saturation aspect - or actually I like to term it the other way: the amount of gray in a color, that is a very important player in our ambient light discussion because grays link colors together! You see, it doesn't matter where the hue is on the color wheel. As we've just seen with our sample environment, the hue can come from anywhere but every hue or color you can think of has this gray area in common!
4:40
And the closer they get to that gray the more naturally they can kind of weave, or modulate in and out of each other. And that's exactly how we can take all these colors and handle them without totally going insane! In fact, painting the ambient light is often my favorite part of any painting! It can be fun and expressive, so long as you have these principles in mind. All right. Let's now bring value back into the conversation and do some painting.
5:05
You'll probably recall this sphere demo from lesson one. It dealt with both direct light from the sun and ambient light in the shadow. We're gonna do something similar here today, only this time we can't use a blank background like that. We need an environment to inform our color decisions. For the sake of demonstration, I'll use this photograph for my environment. I'll just drag my color picker in there so you can follow along with my color choices and let's paint a sphere into this scene,
5:29
right on the path here. Now I will choose to make this a white sphere because white has no local color of its own. In other words, you know, its local color is perfectly desaturated and that's nice for our first demonstration because it allows all the color that goes into the sphere to be the result of either the yellowish sunlight rays or the ambient light colors that are bouncing around in shadow. The first thing I'm gonna do is
5:50
establish a basic value block in to determine where the light and shadow families go. And of course let's not forget about this cast shadow that positions the sphere on this path. And right away I want to remind you that when you have direct light like the sun in this case, all those bounced light rays we just looked at? We don't perceive those in the sunlight! Remember from lesson one that direct light visually overpowers ambient light.
6:13
So I'm just taking a light value, tinting it generically yellow, and that's really all I need to represent the sun. Now the first thing I like to think about, especially when I'm painting an outdoors scene, is where is the skylight coming in from. It's pretty obvious. It comes down from above. It's weaker than the sun, but still has some strength. So this shadow is going to both lighten and get tinted blue in the areas that are exposed upwards towards the sky!
6:36
So when that sky light comes down, it's gonna hit this area of the sphere and it's also gonna hit this area of the cast shadow. The skylight will probably not get in here because it's way too deep of a crevice. If you remember lesson 1, that's where the ambient occlusion goes. So for now, let's just start by applying the ambient light from the sky to our painting. What I'm going to do is kind of pick a generic color for the sky. Now
6:59
this is probably going to be too light if I went super hard with the tablet ... but because I'm using a tablet I can just press softly and mix these colors on the canvas as if this were an oil or acrylic painting. I can also sample, say, this color here ... mix it a little bit ... sample this color here ... mix it a little bit ... So even at this early stage I'm already starting to build up that intricate weaving of ambient light that is causing multiple shadow colors to occur.
7:26
And I'll just show you a little closer. If I start sampling through these ambient light colors, you notice that we are starting to have those relationships of grays! I've painted the most blue up here, so the most saturation I'm getting is here. Which is still very low and therefore remains bound to the other colors. And down here by comparison, just based on the block-in I did, is warmer grays. But next to that blue, those grays that looked just dead before
7:52
actually have some meaning now because they're playing off each other! That blue gray against this yellowy orange gray. In my judgment, there are two more areas to consider. The first is: the sun would be shining down here and hitting the ground all in here and those light rays would bounce up, giving a little more illumination to this area of shadow as well as more saturation. And then lastly, of course, we'll have to deal with our area of ambient occlusion,
8:17
which will happen down here as we know from lesson 1. So I'm gonna tackle the reflected light coming up from this path. But which color do I choose? Well, I know that the sun is generally this kind of yellowish orange color, I also know that when it hits the path, it's going to lose a little bit of its strength. It'll also lose a bit of its color as it inherits some of the path's color. And the path is kind of a neutral earthy color, like a toned-down sienna color, maybe somewhere in this range.
8:43
So what I'll do, I'll just pick a color that's again fairly grayed off - so it remains linked to all the other colors - maybe maybe a little darker. After all it is a shadow. We don't want to ever forget that! It's a shadow. And I want to remind everyone: I'm not a scientist! I don't I'm not trying to think of the exact scientific blending! I'm just trying to get some color in here I'll adjust this as I go, I was trying to get some color in here that is
9:06
motivated by the environment! Now watch this I'm gonna switch to the smudge tool. I really like the smudge tool because it does a great job with soft edges and when you're talking about ambient light, soft edges are really appropriate because that ambient light is coming from everywhere. It's a soft effect in real life ... so we use soft edges to help mimic that in our painting. Soft edges also help you to transition between multiple colors.
9:27
Now what I'm gonna do is just handle this transition area here. And I'm darkening this area a little bit, starting to think about ambient occlusion. I'm also using a slightly more reddish color just to continue on with these, like, sienna earthy colors of the path maybe bouncing into this part of the sphere. I might also want to try some greens! Like, maybe some of these greens from the environment might be coming into our sphere just very subtly. After all those greens are pretty far away.
9:50
So they wouldn't dominate the reflected light. But just a little bit of influence of them will help inform this passage of grays. Another word for grays, by the way, is 'neutrals.' You might hear other people call them 'neutrals.' And then, while I have this brush selected, I'll just, you know, keep working the transition until there's a statement that I find interesting and aesthetically pleasing. And I am pushing the colors a little bit just for demonstration purposes. And on that note,
10:14
I'm gonna push for a little more blue in the shadow. Just cuz I'm looking at the shadows in the background and I'm seeing that there's a cyan quality to them. Probably from the blue sky mixing with the green trees. But I don't have to repaint anything. Because I'm using grays, I can really just paint over these colors that are there and they will mingle. So if there's one takeaway here, it's that there is no one shadow color. There are multiple shadow colors across the same object!
10:38
Going to some warmer neutrals here for the ambient occlusion, and again, the reason I'm keeping it warmer is because there's not gonna be enough skylight colors here to cause any blueish grays. Since the path's local color is warm, I'll just keep this warm. Don't worry, we'll talk about local color more later on. And then as a last effort I will grab an airbrush and set it to multiply mode.
10:57
I'll pick a warmish color like this to contrast from the blues and just start to address my ambient occlusion area. Hopefully you remember from lesson one how soft ambient occlusion is. Here's a photograph of a sphere that demonstrates this kind of softness that I'm talking about. You can see that where the sphere meets the ground is more or less invisible to us. It's lost. And the reason it's lost, again, is because there are very few light rays to give us any information there.
11:22
So as painters we soften these edges to imitate that lack of information. There's also one more aspect of shadow that I did not talk about in lesson one: the idea of a core shadow. Can you see in this photograph how this area of shadow is a little bit darker than this area of shadow? This is common with round objects. But it doesn't happen always. It really depends on the exact nature of how the reflected light is reaching the object.
11:47
There might be in this case a little bit more of it down here. This area is getting a lot of concentrated reflected light from the table. This area is getting a little from the table as well as a little from the surrounding room, whereas the core shadow that I outlined here is getting just a bit less reflected light. So it registers as a bit darker. Remember that ambient light is weak, so even minor changes in position can really affect how much ambient light an area is getting.
12:11
So there's a bit of that core shadow, and I'm just speeding through the rest of this process ... and here it is! Ambient light ... ambient occlusion ... in color! Okay folks! Now I want to take a step into the exciting world of 3d software! I'll be using a piece of software called Blender. And Blender is free. It comes with a real nice rendering engine, which I'll use to render variations on this simple scene. I've got the scene set up right now with one sunlight and absolutely no environment.
12:37
So if I hit render we get a scene devoid of ambient light. Now I happen to have this nifty panoramic environment photo. I'll feed that into blender and hit render again. And would you look at that! Blender has calculated the ambient light! I just went ahead and sampled those shadow colors, and we find that same transition of neutrals colors that are based on the environment they live in. If I swapped out the environment to, say, this one ... and hit render on that ...
13:04
we would naturally get different shadow colors. And because I'm enjoying not having to do the work myself, let's see what else Blender can do! Back in our original scene here, let's bring in an additional object right up to our sphere. ...Did you see the change shadow colors? Watch the bottom of that sphere. When the ground goes down, the sphere loses some of the green. And when the ground comes back up, the green is amplified on the underside of that sphere. We've
13:28
already seen the reason for this: rays from the sun inheriting that green and bouncing up in a diffuse way into our sphere. And you notice the green is relegated to the bottom of the shadow, closest to the green ground. The top of the shadow is still cast blueish by the sky. The sky has a more direct route to that area, so it has more of a say in the overall color cast. All right, just for comparison, let's replace the green ground with a red ground.
13:51
And of course, it's the same principle only with red instead of green. But I want to remind you: the color of the reflected light is usually a step down in saturation from the local color of the object it's coming from. To demonstrate, this is the red of the ground and this is the reddest part of the reflected light. These are the subtle relationships we have to learn to see if we want our paintings to look natural! All right. Are you ready for the next animation? Check this out.
14:26
First person to call out that sound effect gets a free video download from my store! Put your guesses in the comments! Anyway, the reason I'm showing you this is because we have a new situation here. The entire sphere is in shadow now. Which means the whole thing is lit by ambient light. In comparing them, the color distribution is largely the same as before, but I see three major differences. The first is happening in this bottom area. When the sphere is totally in shadow,
14:50
we no longer get that strong red reflected light. The reason is simple: there's no longer any strong sunlight rays bouncing in that immediate area. The second difference is happening at the top of the sphere. I can see a little more influence of blue in the shadow there. Which makes a lot of sense because without the sunlight in play, we can see more influence from the sky as it now dominates that top part of the sphere. And the third difference I see is the area of ambient occlusion.
15:16
When the sphere is totally in shadow, it's getting less reflected light at the bottom, so the transition to ambient occlusion happens over a larger area. Back in Blender, I'm gonna delete the sphere and add a different kind of sphere - one made of more obvious planes. To recall one of my other YouTube videos, planes are nice because they have a very specific orientation in space.
15:38
These planes help us more clearly see how different areas of shadow receive different sections of bounce light from the environment. I really enjoy this little plane here. When we see it by itself like this it just looks like a neutral pink. But in context, we know that it's one part skylight and one part red reflected light from the ground. Okay, let's go one step further and add local color to the mix!
16:00
I'll color the sphere yellow and the ground green. We have our render and I'd like to talk about this area first. The color wheel shows us that yellow and green are next-door neighbors. And just like real next-door neighbors borrowing sugar from each other, the exchange can happen very easily. Just replace sugar with hue and saturation. I can begin with the local color of the yellow sphere in light. Find an appropriate shadow value ... block that in ...
16:25
don't forget the cast shadow ... and then, knowing that yellow and green are next-door neighbors I can sample my yellow shadow, slide up into the greens, increase the value a touch for some reflected light, staying in the same range of saturation ... because again borrowing sugar is easy here ... Paint into my shadows and it starts looking good! When colors live close together like this, it's a pretty simple calculation. But what happens when we have two colors that are not next-door neighbors?
16:51
I'll keep the ground green, but color the sphere red. And on first glance It looks like the green is gone. But it's not really gone! What's happening here is: because these colors are not close neighbors, their journey to borrow sugar from each other becomes a little bit more complicated. Now, you might be tempted to think that red's path to green would go like this - just like we saw from yellow to green
17:13
earlier. But that is just not the case. Near the beginning of this lesson, I pointed out that all colors share this gray area. This becomes relevant when colors live farther away from each other because that's the route they take. So for red to travel to green, it takes a path that looks more like this. Now. It doesn't necessarily have to go perfectly through gray! You can see in the path there, it does still pass through orange and yellow ... just very great versions of them.
17:39
Now, the strength of that red local color is pretty strong. In this case probably somewhere around here in the color wheel. The weak reflected light simply doesn't really allow it to take much of the journey. It probably goes about this far. It's going toward green ... it just doesn't quite get there. That's why when you look at the color that's there ... and I'll zoom in on it ... it certainly doesn't look green. But I hope you can still see the evidence of an influence of green! Now
18:03
watch this. If I wanted to, say, increase the effect of the green bounce light for aesthetic reasons: with this whole gray path in mind I can do it quite easily. First let me sample the shadow and then what I'll do, instead of going up toward the green like this, what I'll do is I'll just gray this color off and move the hue just a hair up toward the green. Now that color I chose is certainly not green!
18:24
But when I paint it, it looks greenish because it represents that red's natural path towards green. It's subtle, I know, but natural and effective. Okay, let's do one more render. This time I've cut that red local color in half. So the hue is still red just a much less saturated red. And I think comparing these two will add one more notch to our understanding. Let's just use our eyes for a moment forget about theories and color wheels. Look at the bottom of the sphere
18:51
I'm sure you can see that the green bounce light shows up more clearly in the sphere on the right. Now look at this upper area of shadow. You don't need me to tell you that that area looks more violet on the right. So the sphere on the right contains a greater variety of color in its shadow. Why? Well it's simple: weaker local colors can more easily make the trip to other colors! The sphere on the Left had a strong local color and there was no way it could make the trip all the way to the
19:18
green and for this area There is no way it could manage this trip all the way into the blues. It tried to get there, but the local color was strong and prevented it. But on this sphere the local color is somewhere around here. Already much closer to gray. That means its journey to green is shorter. Maybe looking something like this. It's an easier trip, so it's able to go further.
19:41
That's why more green is showing up on our model. And it's really the same thing for the blues: for this color to get to blue, it'll go through gray. But there's a pretty straight line available here. Now, it has to cover a greater distance to get to the blue than it did to the green and because we remember from lesson 1 that ambient light is weak,
19:58
it just doesn't propel this color strongly enough to make the entire journey. In my estimation, it stops around there - resulting in that grayish purple. Alright, let's apply this in two different lighting scenarios. That's overcast on the left, sunlight on the right. I'll divide the process into stages so it's easy to follow along. So let's go step one. Local color. The sphere is red, so I paint red. Dead simple.
20:21
Let's move to step two: light and shadow. And you might be wondering why only the sphere on the right is updating. Well, if you remember from lesson one: an overcast day means the entire scene is in shadow. So that sphere on the left is only lit by ambient light. Ambient light is step three. Now watch carefully as both spheres get different treatments, depending on the strength of ambient light they're being affected by. Starting on the left, an overcast day is very weak light.
20:46
There isn't a lot of strong bounces going on like there is with sunlight. So on the right you can see greens from the grass bouncing up into that red, like we looked at earlier. But on the left, that doesn't really happen. Or at least not nearly as much. Now consider the influence of the sky. On left, the entire top part of the sphere is exposed to the lights of that cool grey sky. That's why it's getting a bit lighter and a bit cooler. The sky influences the sphere on the right as well,
21:13
but only in that top part of the shadow. It's bluer on the right because sunny days often come with blue skies, but it also falls off more quickly as it gives way to the reflected light from the grass. Okay, the next part of our lighting is ambient occlusion. And I'll apply what we saw in our 3d example before on the left. The soft overall ambient lighting makes the ambient occlusion area pretty large. And in the sunlight on the right,
21:36
there's a lot of bounced light going on kind of competing to hit the object. And that sequesters the ambient occlusion to a smaller area. And once I have all that information there the painting becomes kind of a free-for-all, where I can adjust this ... adjust that ... make the ambient occlusion darker, lighter, softer, you know, add some bounce light here ... remove some bounce light there ... all of it to come up with something that looks both accurate as well as aesthetically pleasing.
22:00
Alright, so what I'm doing now is just adding a bit of bonus information. I'm basically pretending like there's a white strip on that ball, because a white object gets all of its colour information from the light that hits it. This little band is a good indicator of the exact kind of bounce light that is occurring in each scene. One notable difference in the sunlight on the right: there's way more green bounce light coming up from the grass and you can really see it influencing that white band.
22:25
Contrast that with the white band on the left, which is overall far more subdued in its colors, as its lighting situation doesn't provide that same intensity of the bounce light. And here's the finish! Two different ambient light situations. Strong local color, weak local color, all in one study. It's a great way to practice this stuff. All right, painting spheres is fun, but I'd like to suggest some broader ways of studying this. Two words: START SIMPLE!
22:50
This is a painting I did 12 years ago when I was first discovering this ambient light stuff. It's just a scene I saw out my window. It may appear simple, but look at all the shadow colors you can find in even this painting. And that's the thing when studying light from life. I recommend looking for scenes that don't present huge drawing problems. That way you can focus your efforts on capturing the light and color. And you can find things worthy of study
23:14
everywhere! That sketch on the left was done just down street from where I live. The sketch on the right is St. Peter's in Rome. But light doesn't discriminate based on location! These are both paintings of white local colored objects, which gave me the opportunity to explore various mixtures of shadow colors! Some more old paintings here. I did these to try and apply what I had been learning to more imaginative scenes.
23:36
And you notice how they're all lit with this very contrived shaft of light? That allowed me to easily determine what would be lit by direct light and what would be lit by ambient light. And I know it's creatively redundant to always light a scene this way, but as far as study is concerned this really helped me develop the skill of controlling both light and color from my imagination. Here's a sculpture by the inimitable Andrea Blasich. A sculpture with chiseled planes like this
24:02
really makes clear the direction of the form. And in this case having that information helps us trace back the source of the ambient light happening in the shadows. Additionally, those color cards offer a very nice glimpse at how shadow colors weave together. You know, I recommend try sculpture yourself! It'll really help with your understanding of form in general - which then feeds directly back into your painting. Understanding how light works in real life gives you the basis for
24:26
expression. If we were to grade this beautiful watercolor by Alvaro Castagnet solely on its adherence to realism, you'd probably say that the bounced light in this area is way too red. I mean, sure, there'd be some red bounce light there ... but not that much. However, artistically, it's that exaggeration that makes this piece really pop! It's almost like a caricature of light or an enhanced reality. And the ability to pull that off does not come naturally.
24:50
It can only be achieved after lots of experience with the fundamentals. And, well, that's where I hope this video has helped you! Okay, folks, that's it for this lesson. Thanks for spending time on my channel today and extra thanks to my Patrons. You guys really help make these videos possible. If you haven't seen the patreon page go check it out I've tried to put really good rewards up there and I've recently added some upper tier levels.
25:14
So with that I'll say goodbye, and I'll see you in another video!
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