Art Journal 019: The Light Orbs

I’m finally home from SPX and I’m completely burnt from traveling so I decided to give myself something light to work on that I can type up quickly and get some rest (next week is going to be a big lesson post about drawing clothing folds and wrinkles, by the way), so I decided to expand on something I touched on in Art Journal 014: Lighting.  When I work on my comics I have a phase where I incorporate a light orb into my work and then use this to plot out where my light source will illuminate and where it’ll cast in shadow. I’ve shown shots of different stages in different contexts but I haven’t actually demonstrated its use, so I’d like to do that today, just to go easy on myself.  The big posts will resume next week.

The light orb is incredibly useful to me.  When I was just starting to explore maintaining specific light sources within a scene I would spend a lot of time painting-over and redoing lights to get them to work, so having a little sample mock-up to say “oh okay, the light is hitting this quadrant so facets facing this way are lit and everything else is slightly darker accordingly” really helped speed up the painting process. It was also a great way of helping me figure out when a limb would be casting a shadow on a character’s body, and where it would go.  I think of it as a thumbnail for lights, just a quick sphere with some quick light blotched on to give me a sense of direction and form.  

In today’s example I’ve drawn one default lineart pose and applied five directional lights to it, using my light orbs for reference.  This is actually a fun exercise to help develop a sense of light, depth and form, and a great way to see the profound effect lighting has on changing the mood of the exact same lineart figure.  I have a couple shorthands for my light orbs which make sense to me:  the blotch on the front is a “lighting is clearly from the front” note, whereas a rim light arc means the light source is actually behind my figures.  This might seem like a basic distinction but it makes a world of difference for comic lighting- if a light is in front or behind basically means if the figure as seen by the camera is going to be primarily highlight or shadow, which in turn dictates how I’d approach painting it (a back-lit character gets a heavy dark treatment and then light is applied around the edges, for example).  

When I’m blocking in my shadows (since I’m often using a dark tone to turn my midtone into lighter and darker shapes) one of the most important things for me to think about is space and overlap.  Where is everything, and where is it in relation to everything else?  In the above examples I chose a pose where Monday had one arm on his hip to the side roughly parallel to his torso and a second arm which bends forward towards the camera, away from his body.  When I model my light and shadow I take special consideration of what is in front of what and what might stick out where- for example, Monday’s suit lapels are foldovers and would cast a bit of a shadow on the suit around it, as well as there being depth between his suit jacket and suit vest and his tie being a raised physical presence over his dress shirt.  

An example I’ve used in the past which really helps me a lot here is to think of your figures in terms of low-poly character models, like early PC or Playstation/N64-era basic polygons.  This low-poly thought process helps you find the most basic facets of your characters and figure out where everything is pointing in relation to the light (as a rule: the more directly a facet faces a light source the more brighter it will be, angles away from completely facing the light will appear darker).  When handing light from the back it’s important also to remember where your side facets are facing, since these won’t be bathed in shadow, they’ll probably be picking up a lot of the rear light source and helping define and give your figures depth and shape despite mostly being in the dark.

Most of the heavy stuff about drawing lighting is laid out in the previous journal entry, but I wanted to take a day to elaborate a little on how I use my light orbs specifically. If you’re a painter or a painterly cartoonist they’re indescribably handy tools to keep in your toolbox.  If you’re the drawing type then doing one lineart, copying it a bunch of times and toning it from different light sources is a very helpful way to practice both lighting and modeling your figures; if you’re not the drawing type a) you absolutely can be, you can start exploring your unique artistic voice right now! and b) this is a look into how I do what I do.  Go into everything with a concrete plan in mind, set up my framework and build towards detail from a very basic foundation.  If you dive right into detail you’re bound to get lost in it, forever.