[DeathJester]

Hi, I am trying to work on lighting.. was wondering if this looked somewhat right? What need to be corrected.. Also I was using painter and saved it as a JPG and went into Photoshop and it made the Brightness seemed turned up and my shading looked really off? Any thoughts?

To add, If anyone has good exercises for lighting that would be great too. I did a search for lighting and found a few things that could help.. But, if anyone has ideas I would greatly appreciate it.

My reasoning is someone said I needed to work on my depth... so I figured learning lighting would help. If anyone knows a few good books on color theory and such, I would greatly appreciate that as well.

Many Thanks

[Steven Stahlberg]

Thanks for what you wrote in Torstein's thread; since you asked I'll give it a shot: the lighting is close, in the ballpark, but a bit blurry and indecisive on the torso - like you want the light to reach more, to define more, but you realise (perhaps intuitively) that it can't... I know the feeling, who wants to draw a boring plain black silhouett? But that's almost what this would be with this lighting. You should move the lightsource a little to our left if you want more 'light-play'. If you keep the light there you should be harsher with where you place the 'terminator' (the border between light and shadow).

For instance, judging from the direction of the light (by the shadow cast on the floor), I think there would be a shadow reaching up from his right armpit to the collarbone, separating the deltoid from the pectoral - how wide and dark depending on his muscular definition of course.
Also I think very little light would reach the middle of that pec, and his ribcage just below the pec.

I think there would be a strong almost circular highlight on his skull, along the side closest to the light source.

Something that can really help when you want to study lighting effects on the human body is the Poser 3d software - for simple one-source lighting like this, move it around, render, draw it - great practise.
But keep in mind that
1. the Poser bodies are not 100% anatomically correct, especially when they bend the joints, and
2. their skin don't quite catch the light the same way real skin does, and
3. strong light will not bounce off one part of the skin onto another as in real life.
So at the same time keep on studying from real life. But Poser can help you find where to put those pesky terminators.

[DeathJester]

Thanks Steven,

I'll give it a try.. I greatly appreciate your reply..