The last
skill mentioned on the drawing basics page was the skill of
deciphering highlights, shadow, and tones and shades. We
mentioned there diving right into color is too much to start
with. Beginning with tones and shades of gray is the
best place to begin. After mastering grayscale, you can
work your way up to color.
In the
following color photo, light is coming from all sorts of
directions. There's direct sunlight coming through the window
she's leaning against, there's reflected light coming from an
unseen wall hitting the left side of her face, and there's
shadows - some very subtle - weaving their way into all this
light. Here's the color photo:

Can
you tell the direct light apart from the reflected light?
Reflected light can be very subtle
The next
picture you're about to see shows both reflected and direct
light. Scan closely around the picture - squinting will help -
and look for areas that are just a little bit brighter than
the shadows around them. Most of these areas of reflected
light will be on the left side of the features. Why? because
features like the nose stick out just a little bit to catch
that light or, in areas like the cheek, just plane face the
direction the light is coming from.

The
blue arrows represent the direct light and the yellow arrows
represent a few areas of reflected
light - notice how the reflected light is so much softer and
diffused compared to the
direct light; light follows logic
Shifting to grayscale To tell
all those different shades of tone and color apart in this
color picture, well that's pretty tough to do if you're just
starting out. But in this next picture the number of colors
has been reduced the to just three: black, white and one tone
of gray. That's all there is. And doesn't it make it a much
more "understandable" picture? The subject is still
recognizable even with all the color taken out.
(The
highlights come out much brighter in the reflected light areas
- as bright as the direct light, but the shape of the
reflected light becomes much easier to see. In fact, the line
between the light and shadow forms a contour. Remember
"contour" from above?) Here's that picture with all the color
taken out:

Picture of our model with all the colors reduced to
black, white and gray - works to really identify the areas
of light and shadow
Notice
anything else? There's real logic to light. It's as logical as
the physics governing a bouncing ball. Well almost. It's as
logical as a bouncing ball you tossed at a wall in room in
outer space and in a vacuum. If you throw a ball in this outer
space room, it bounces off things until something
catches it. In the same way, light comes into a room,
it bounces off a wall, a certain amount gets captured by the
wall it hits, but some will still bounce off until it hits
something else.
This is
exactly the same way light is working in this picture: it
comes in the window on the right, hits our model's face and
hair, but enough other light that we can't see is
coming into the room too, and it's bouncing off the wall on
left (which is somewhere out of the picture) and hitting her
on the the left side of her face as reflected light.
The reflected light is weaker now (it's left some of it's
energy in and on the wall it's bouncing off) and so this
weakened light lights up the left side of our model's face -
but with less brightness than the light coming in through the
window on the left. (Take another look at those pictures
above.)
Combining everything you've seen on this page: try
drawing this picture
Now let's
pull everything together you've seen on this page. By first
reducing all the complicated colors to grayscale, you've got a
manageable, contoured picture. By overlaying a grid on top of
our model, you can break the seemingly complicated picture
into a group of much more manageable mini-drawings. Each
square within the grid can be treated as it's own little
drawing.
So click
on the accompanying linked pages (one page with a grid-covered
model face and one with an empty grid) and do this: one
square at a time redraw what you see. Go through each square
of the grid on the model and and ask these kinds of questions:
- Where
are the edges?
- Are
there negative shapes here?
- Where
to lines and edges enter the square?
- Where
do they leave?
- What
angles do they form with the vertical and horizontal lines
of the grid?
- What
are the different shapes of the colored areas?
- How
much of the smaller grid does each shape (gray, black or
white) occupy? That is, what proportion of the square does
it fill?
And you
go through each square asking those kinds of questions. What
if this gets contusing? Flip both your grid and your drawing
upside down! See, now you're really using your drawing skills.
:-)
For the
big version of this pre-gridded picture you can print out
click on the button below. (Once you open the pop-up page,
click on the "file" option at the top left of the tool bar -
at the very top of the page - and scroll down to
"print".That's it!)

For the big version you can print out click on the button below (and
when you get there, click on "file" at the top left of the
tool bar on the pop-up page and scroll down to
"print".)
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