Lighting and value

The last week before christmas break we continued working on our characters, after some introduction to lighting and values we were tasked to render our line art in grey scale. Some useful things I learned this week was to start with a grey background instead of the standard white and to use reflective light to show shapes. Another thing that was brought up was to use a secondary light source to create volume, for this drawing I considered what it would look like in colour even though it would be in grey scale for this assignment. As she is a moon goddess I wanted her to be hunting in the moonlight. Therefore I chose to set the arrow on fire to contrast the cold moonlight with the warm, orange firelight.

The final image turned out better than I had hoped and I feel that the process of working with volume that I have gone through has allowed me to change the way I think when drawing. It has opened my eyes to things, many of which I already knew, that I have not been able to use and I do not believe I could have achieved what I did before this course.

There was no reflective assignment for this week so I will just add some thoughts on what we learned. I felt again that the introduction to the subject was very brief and a few of my class mates as well as myself were left wondering how to apply it. It got better a day or two later when we got a more thorough walkthrough on how to approach the task at hand, as well as getting feedback during the process of creation. I do wish we could have gotten more lecture time on the subject as it can be very tricky, you could probably fill an entire course with just lighting and values. It just felt very brief since it is a very large subject and such an important one.