Values for different lighting situations.
At this point is when the good stuff starts. Robert & Dice work in animation doing colorscript (among many other things) so there were times when they had to put one same scene into different lighting situations. That´s something we all had to do at some point in our careers and it´s very painful to have to repaint the hole work just to change the lighting.
I don´t know if they came to this tecnique all by themselves or they took it from someone else, and honestly I really don´t care, but the thing is it´s a very easy and fast way of working. By using basically hue/saturation masks and playing weather making them overlayed, multiplied, colored… you´re now able to change the basic lighting situation and only having to repaint a little bit.
This week was about value and we had to work in a greyscale so it doesn´t look so spectacular, but I think the change between each lighting situation is there. I believe it´s an extremely helpful knowledge to achieve for any of us. Once I got to understand the technique I was able to add it into my working process. Now I can paint this way naturally and it chanched it all, making everything so much easy.
Also painting from natural was starting to feel good to me at this point and I was feeling quite comfortable with the resaults and timming of my work. From one to two hours the first paintings and half an hour to one hour the lighting adaptations. I was painting in my desk in a neutral difuse light (the first paintings) and for the direct light I used a low power lighting source so even in the photos you can see it´s no big difference. Now I feel sad I didn´t use a secondary light source.
Something I´ve notice in my paintings is that is that they look a little low contrasted. I think it´s caused by a lack of confidence.
I love the the white case/cage (I don´t know how to call it) ended up looking. White element over white background it´s a very interesting exercise to do. You should try it (works the same for similar color between object and background).
The transparency of the bottle looks quite nice to me and it didn´t took that much. When I had to paint this kind of objects from my head I´ve always had trouble. This is why painting from natural is such a good exercise, because you tent to make things more difficult when you don´t know how they work in reallity.
This is my favourite one (over). The box was so similar to the table… at the end it was easy to paint and ended up looking simple… I´ve thought a lot about this ´cause when things come out easily they use to end up looking good, just like in life… I don´t know, I have contradictory feelings about this.
This is the ugly one (the second one) jajajajajajaajaja… I think it´s because I popped up the light in the bag too much. Funny this is the one that took the most time to finish.