[KroM]

I'm havin a bit of trouble painting a figure with backlighting. He's gonna be in a sunset scene with the sun setting behind him. I just can't figure out what the shadows would look like with the light behind him, especially on his face.

If anyone knows of any pictures with like lighting I could reference to, or even wants to make a quick sketch as reference, please post it here.

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Kelsey Martin
[email protected]
http://kromillustration.20m.com

[surferboi]

i drew this with the sun nearly set and directly behind him. im prolly wrong in how i drew it but maybe this will bump you back up till someone that knows their shit fixes it.

[eric_morrell]

What you do is you have multible light sources. If you have one light source, the sun, you are in fact going to have multible because of reflections. But if you are in a dark room with a light then you will have barely no reflections. In this case you will have a lot of reflective highlights to show detail. A camera usually doesn't pick these highlights up as much as the human eye does. If you want to show that the sun is the main light source then you put a large terminator on the shadow comming from the sun. It sounds hard but it is easy to do in graphite. It is much harder to do in color I have found because the shadows are going to be the opposite of the backing (i.e. warm lighting = cool shadows). This may sound a little complicated because I'm not good at organizing my thoughts but if you want to do it right just set up a mirror with a strong light right behind you and try to figure it out. Sorry I couldn't help more.
Eric Morrell http://morrell.8k.com