Learning About Lighting

This month I've learnt quite a lot about lighting so I thought I'd put together this post as a summary of my findings so far. Despite having read a lot of critiques of lighting in live action films such as "Blade Runner" I had not read much about lighting techniques or about using lighting in my drawings. In the past I've always drawn the areas of light and dark where I sort of think they look right without putting any thought into the light sources or the surrounding environment, the lighting in my work was very sketchy and didn't make much sense. As I researched the work of Mark Mignolia, Sam Keith, Frank Miller and many other artists I began to realise that I was lacking a very important tool especially when it comes to drawing cartoons without a well lit reference image. 

I began by flicking through my many "how to draw..." books but I struggled to find anything which properly explained how lighting works (many would say "use dramatic lighting" but wouldn't give much more of an explanation). I went to the library and found some books on basic lighting for photographers, each page had a photo and a diagram explaining the lighting set up, after spending some time studying each picture and the lighting set up everything began to click into place. 

So now I'm experimenting a lot with lighting, I find it's best to draw a quick sketch of the scene first and then workout a lighting plan before adding shadows, I think this will be very useful for my section of the Deep project.

An example of a lighting plan;

A quick sketch based on the lighting plan;

Some more recent sketches;