The next very important topic that we need to cover in order to make your compositions
flow and be very easy to read is lighting.
Now, lighting in its most basic form is a directional light source, an object that catches
that light and then a shadow on that object away from the light.
Now that gets a little bit more complex when we have an object or light source, a shadow
away from the light.
And a surface that's going to be obscured by the object in front of it.
And so, for the purposes of illustration I almost always and I highly recommend that
you do too use a directional light source as opposed to a pin light which will radiate
light out in all directions and this can be extraordinarily difficult to compensate for
for really very little practical effect and so, what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw
a line from the outline of my foreground object and that is where we going to cast a shadow
onto the object below it.
And one further thing to bear mind is that when you have an object, a surface below that
object and a light source that's directional like this, I'll draw a shadow across my object
away from the light, a shadow onto the surface behind where that surface is being obscured
by the object but also this surface catches light and reflects light back up onto my object
and so, that creates a core shadow.
So the core shadow is where it's receiving no light at all.
This where my main light is hitting, this light source and then my bounce light is creating
a light on the back of my surface here.
This is something that can be very effective but it can also lead to a lot of problems
and because we're dealing with comic book illustration, we're going to avoid this kind
of effect for now.
And just before we move on, I'm going to draw a very very simple shape for a nose.
There's my eyes over the nose and I've got a cheek behind it, my lip just below it.
Very very simple just to get the point across and I'm going to draw my same light source
and so, on this side of the nose away from the light, I'm going to have a shadow.
Have a shadow here away from the light and along the bottom just like that.
Very simple.
This is using as simple shapes as we possibly can we'll also have shadows where the eyes
recess and we'll just draw those as simple shapes for now.
But it's important to bear in mind that the nose projects outward from the face and here's
my lip and my brow, draw my eye all very very simple just to get it across and here would
be the plane of my cheek like this.
My nose projects out quite a bit and so, it's going to cast a shadow just like this example
here.
This will be my nose and this will be my cheek, the surface of my cheek now they're attached.
These are separate but it's going to cast a shadow across that surface just like this.
And so, what I have here is a body shadow, what I have here is a cast shadow and I can
soften this up toward the light using a little bit of line but my cast shadow always needs
to remain hard because it represents the outline of my nose cast against a surface below.
So, this will be a body shadow here, a body shadow here body shadow here and then below
the lip I'll get a cast shadow.
It goes out further.
And it's important to remember the distinction between the two when you're doing your lighting.
So now that we have a very very basic understanding of lighting established here, we're going
to start to learn how to use lighting compositionally to help our panels come together and be more
readable.
And so, I'm going to start with simple shape for a figure.
I just want this to be an outline shape.
And here's a figure drawn into a panel.
I'm going to light him again from the same angle that I used just over here.
So, he'll have a little bit of shadow cast here.
And that's all fine but what I really want to concentrate on is the cast shadow from
this figure onto the wall behind and you can see that that cast shadow not only is relatively
accurate but it also really helps to frame my figure and pop this figure forward because
I'm using a light shape that's juxtaposed over a dark shape and then using the rules
of composition I used before, I can just cast a shadow over the wall entirely as if this
is a window casting the light on them and I can use that to by figure.
And this is a technique you will see used over and over again in comics when you start
to look for it.
Conversely I've got a figure fully in shadow so he's completely in silhouette and I can
draw a doorway around him just like this and because he's dark, he stands out against the
light coming through the door behind him and that dark to light to dark reads very very
easily and also serves to frame my figure just the way that I did here.
Now, I wanted to talk about the final way that I use shadow compositionally and this
method can be a little bit confusing if you think of it just in terms of using a light
source and proper shadow.
So, the way that it works is I'll draw just very simple shapes.
So, I've got a rectangular shape here.
I'm going to keep this light.
I'm going to draw a shape behind it and this shape will be dark and now I'll draw another
shape behind that.
This one will be light and then a shape behind this and this will be dark, another light
shape and a dark shape and I can keep going across my panel just by layering light and
shadow.
And I do try to bear in mind that I've got a light source coming from here and so, if
I had my light source coming from here I'd want to lay the other way around so at the
very least, I have my light portions pointing toward the light as much as possible.
But when I think in terms of my shadow, I'm really thinking in terms of layering more
than just thinking in terms of exactly where a shadow would fall.
So, a really good way to show this in practice would be to show some chimneys.
Let me get in here and draw a chimney in the foreground and I'm going to keep these pretty
simple.
Just a little bit of detail just so we all know it's a chimney.
And now behind it, I'm going to draw another chimney shape and this one is just going to
be dark and making the chimney behind my light chimney here dark really separates the two
and then I can draw another chimney behind this one, this won't be light and then maybe
another shape just behind this and this will be dark and I can go all the way back through
a panel and just layer my shapes like this and this is a great way to use shadow to achieve
depth in a picture just by layering lights onto darks onto lights onto darks all the
way back and it's a very very simple technique to use.
It's something you really don't need to overthink.
That's it for this lesson.
If you enjoyed this video, take a look at the premium course over at proko.com/comicpage.
See if you can apply some of these basic principles to your own work.
Thanks so much for joining, I'll see you next time.