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Dom Lay: Hey guys my name is Dom Lay and I’m an artist and mentor, currently working as
an independent freelancer, and a visual development artist on my own personal projects.
Most recently on my art book Journey To The East and my next project Blue November, which
is currently in the works.
But today I want to bring you guys a really cool tutorial on how you can create an evocative
story image just to the use of dynamic lighting.
So my favorite artist to study of light logic comes from a lot of watercolor painters, such
as Thomas Schaller, Prafull Sawant and Gary tucker, just to name a few.
And I find their work so fascinating due to how they utilize light in their paintings
in such a unique and skillful way.
And from observing them, they paint in this sort of non-finito or unfinished type of style,
and they use this method in which they take the brightest area of the canvas as their
light source for the rest of the painting.
Using some of my recent work as an example, you'll notice how I try to keep everything
as simple as I can.
I believe lighting is one of those key core fundamental principles that can probably be
the most difficult to understand for a lot of people.
However, you know, once you practice it a lot it can be a really useful tool to help
drive emotion and mood in a concept or illustration.
It's probably the second most strongest fundamental next to color and as humans, our eyes gravitate
towards things that grab and hold our attention.
Just like how mods or insects are attracted to light in the evening, people are attracted
to bright light objects as well since it creates contrast, and contrast helps guide our eyes
towards strong focal points within an image.
So now onto the actual painting process - usually before I begin, I like to gather a few references
that will dictate the entire image.
Here I pick this location up top to tell the story and these other references will be supplementing
the overall lighting and the mood that I kind of want to aim for.
So, we'll be using the architectural scenes as a template for our entire image.
I’ll typically start by dropping in some quick grayscale tonal values on the canvas
to get rid of the bright white background.
First, I’ll go ahead by laying in my perspective, which is a one point perspective based on
the position of the camera and by doing this it helps to keep the overall structure of
the image intact so as not to warp the perspective later on.
I also make sure that I’m blocking in my big shapes first.
At this stage, we're not worrying too much about any medium or small shapes, we're pretty
much just masking the big structural elements first before we get into the nitty-gritty
details.
Another thing to note is I’ll usually keep my brush set pretty limited so things don't
get too confusing with too big of a brush set, because once we have a very huge brush
set, we tend to be scattered all over the place with our brush usage.
So, we want to try to keep the brush set as minimal as possible, and I’m only using
about three to five brushes for the entire image.
So another thing to keep in mind as I’m painting, I’m keeping most of the image
mid-tone gray, so about a 70% grayscale and the reason why I keep this is we're going
to be carving out the light slowly as you'll see in a little bit instead of going full
into the lighting.
Once we have this mid-tone gray structure laid out first, it'll be easier to place the
light in.
So I’m giving a lot of these structural elements pretty loose.
A lot of these details are pretty implied on the architecture.
I want to make sure that nothing is super highly rendered because the main focus of
this workflow is describing the mood and the lighting - the essence of the image.
Not necessarily how detailed we can get this but to hopefully create in a way that can
strike a mood and emotion within our audience.
As you can see, I’m using different tools such as the Lasso tool and the Magic Wand
tool.
And I use these tools because it helps to really carve out different shapes that you
want to get really clean and you can't necessarily do that all the time just by painting in the
shapes, so the Lasso tool and the Magic Wand tool are great tools for really getting those
clean edges on whatever it is you're painting.
And if you want to make it more painterly, you can go to the mixer brush and you can
kind of smudge the edges a little bit to make it look more painterly.
So now here, I’ll start to carve out a lot of my light shapes.
And as you can see how making the grayscale is a lot easier for doing that sort of process,
literally just carving out the lights with the Lasso tool I’m having the lighting come
from around the top right area and it's hitting the left area of the canvas.
I’m also merging my layers together, collapsing everything so that way I can carve the light
shapes a lot easier, and you can do that in Photoshop by pressing Ctrl shift alt E, and
that collapses all the layers and puts a new one on the top of the stack.
During this process of carving in the light, I’m also working on putting in the medium
and the smaller details now.
I’m slowly building up the image little by little by adding more details on and I’m
also collapsing the layers as I go.
It's important to keep in mind that we're also using the lighting as a way to tell the
story.
So, whatever direction that your lighting is hitting the scene, it's going to be lighting
that area to illuminate a particular focal point or it creates a way for the eye to look
in that direction while we have other focal points within the scene.
You also notice how I’m using the Mixer Brush to pull some of the edges towards the
bottom of the canvas and it looks like it has this drip like the effect of watercolor.
What I’m trying to do is replicate the technique and the style that watercolor artists use
in which they use the wetness of the pigment to make it look like it's abstract or unfinished.
But you can see something like the ground plant for instance.
I’m not really describing in detail the ground plane with a lot of high rendering.
Using the fundamentals of perspective, we can create the focal distance in a way that
looks like the building in the background is kind of far away from our point of view.
I’m also taking into account the atmospheric perspective, just to see how far we can push
back some of the details in the background to make sure our foreground elements are a
lot darker and our background elements are a lot lighter in value.
This is why the value stage is so important to make sure that our contrast is working
well.
So that way, when we go to color this thing, it's not going to be as difficult for us to
maintain the value structure while we're coloring the image.
So, here I’m putting details in the background like white buildings to imply that there's
some structures in the background behind this large focal structure in the middle right
here.
As you can see, I’m not making it super high rendered, it's literally just shapes
that I’m playing around with.
What's cool about this is you can apply certain structures like this in a landscape environment
to show that there's a lot more grander scale of buildings.
So, in this portion, I’m starting to lay down some of the color tones and how I do
this is I’ll create a new layer and in the little drop down menu in the Layer Settings,
you can set the mode to Color and from there, I usually use like an airbrush or an opaque
round brush to quickly throw in some colors.
And the thing about using the Color Mode Layer is when you go to paint down color tones,
it won't be affecting the bright white spaces, but instead, you'll be painting the tones
on the midtone values.
And once I’m happy with the tones that I’ve laid down, I’ll make a collapse layer pressing
Ctrl Shift Alt E again and I will switch my Blending mode to normal.
So what I can do is I can hold down Shift and press Right click and there should be
a menu that opens up on your brush and you can select the Normal mode from there on your
brush.
And from that point you can start to paint some of the colors in manually by selecting
a higher saturation.
And what I’ll do sometimes is I’ll take the Magic Wand selection and I’ll select
certain areas where I want to pop certain colors out - like in the building in the background,
you see I’ll pop an orange color underneath the top of the roof structure and maybe I’ll
pop out some oranges underneath the awnings just to give it some push of color.
So, it might look a bit abstract, but that's okay.
We want a little bit more saturation in these areas so it doesn't look dull and bland and
desaturated, void of color.
Sometimes I’ll use a levels adjustment on the layer itself pressing Ctrl L and that
kind of adjusts the value range so it gives the image a bit more contrast.
What you can also do is, if you go up to Image, you can play around with Auto Contrast, Auto
Tone and Auto Color and those settings will kind of automatically level out the values
for you and the tones of the colors in the image.
It's a quick way to find if your colors look balanced or not and if they don't look balanced,
you can always go back and fix the colors manually yourself by using the color balance
as well or the Hue Slider and you can open up the Hue Slider by pressing Ctrl U and change
the shifts of color there or you can press Ctrl B for the color balance and change the
temperature of the color there.
For making the light brighter in the image, sometimes what I’ll also do is right click
and Shift again to pull up the menu for the color blending modes and I’ll change the
Blending Mode to Color Dodge, and I’ll use Color Dodge on the edges of the light areas
to kind of pop out the light a little bit more than what it looked like previously,
which was a little bit of a duller light.
So I wanted to give it more of a brighter light setting.
So, this point in the image, I’m kind of just refining some of the details, going back
and fixing areas that need a little bit more fixing or adding some more things to the buildings
and things like that.
So now, after I have kind of the whole scene laid out, this is the part where I want to
start focusing more on the storytelling aspect of it.
So, I’m getting to bring more characters into the scene to kind of breathe more life
into this empty area, and the best way you can do that is by adding characters.
I feel that if a scene is void of characters, it tells a little less impactful story than,
say if there was just one character in the scene.
I believe that adding more than one character really helps to establish a more stronger
narrative within your image.
So, having your characters interact within the scene is a great way to establish that
connection for your audience.
So, if I want to add quick characters into this scene, what I’ll usually do is I’ll
grab reference of people from different images and I’ll quickly lasso them out or use a
Magic Wand tool and I’ll place them in the scene or I’ll paint roughly their silhouette
of the characters within the scene.
Whenever I think of my stories, I do my best to keep it as simple and as easily digestible
as much as possible.
Instead of making my designs grandiose in nature, I keep everything a bit grounded.
And this includes the characters, the architecture and the props in the scene.
There's this phenomenon that people tend to gravitate towards and develop a preference
for things that are familiar with them.
This is quite commonly known as "the mere exposure effect" or "familiarity principle".
It seems that when stories have a much more human aspect to them, people can relate to
it much easier and draw an emotion out of it rather than if something looks strange
or out of this world.
This is the connection that I want to maintain with my audience.
So, the main premise of this story here is about a man who is on his way to his office
and he accidentally drops some of his papers along the way.
Two men come to investigate and wonder what the problem is and a bystander is watching
next to our point of view.
I also put more characters in the background to make the scene feel more alive along with
the narrative.
So now that I’ve filled in and added more characters, I wanted a few more points of
interest to the environment which are the statues that are propped up at the top of
the building in the back.
Just like the characters, I’ll find some reference photos of ancient Greek statues
found outside and in museums and changed the silhouette of it a little bit as well as matching
the tone and lighting within the piece.
I feel that by adding some of these statues in, it now makes the scene feel more imposing
and monumental.
And we can also identify the scale in how big the characters are in comparison to the
statues.
I’ll use blending modes like Normal and multiply to again, knock back some of the
detail on it since we don't want too much of the detail from the photo, but just enough
that it is implied.
Towards the end, I’ll add some more stylistic choices like color underneath certain areas
of shadows that I find - and I’ll add smaller details like the birds I put in just so it
adds a bit more liveliness to the scene as well.
With a few more touch-ups, I’ll use Mixer Brush to make some areas lesser in detail
just so the eye can travel to certain areas of rest.
So now we can see how the lighting has worked its magic to breathe a sense of awe and dynamism
within the piece.
Using light can really help to create a strong emotional impact without much use of hyper-realistic
rendering.
And that wraps up the end of this lesson - I hope this technique allows you to be more
creative in your lighting scenarios and approach the subject of light more confidently.
If you guys would like to see more of my work, you can check out my Instagram at Layered
Painter or on my ArtStation page.
And if you're interested in a personal mentorship, you can contact me anytime through Instagram
or email to set something up with me.
Before I go, I like to briefly talk about my art book projects that can hopefully inspire
you one day to create something full length and unique of your own.
In summer of 2020, I recently released a personal project titled "Journey To The East", which
is a concept art illustration art book that follows the tale of two heroes finding a lost
trove hidden in a different dimension.
The book is deeply rooted in the orientalism time period with small hints of science fiction.
The project has spanned at least three years in length to complete and has now sold in
many different countries around the world.
If this is something you are interested in looking at, and if you'd like to purchase
a limited copy from me, feel free to message me anytime.
Currently, I am working on a brand new project titled "Blue November" which will be released
in the near future.
I also have a few tutorials on Gumroad.com where you can learn more processes on how
I approach my recent paintings as well as download my brush packs that I used for this
video.
With that being said, happy painting and I’ll see you next time.