Frooboober

i just got out of work and i’m tired as fuck so idk if this makes sense but learning abt light falloff is lowkey a game changer. so in the top image see how the light gets dimmer as it gets further away from the lamp? that’s light falloff, basically it means that the lights get dimmer the further away you get from the light source. the shadows stay the same tho

in the bottom pic, the light source is coming from the camera. both her forehead and the front part of her drum thing are facing the camera (light source). but because the drum thing is closer, the lights are brighter there. the shadows are (basically) the same values everywhere tho so there’s actually less contrast in the face

another major game changer is soft/hard edges.

this is a very large generalization of a complex concept BUT basically if a shadow is being cast by another object, it has a hard(sharp) edge. if it’s following the form of an object, it’s soft

when i posted this a lot of ppl complimented the “colors”. but the colors on this piece are actually pretty unremarkable, like 90% of this painting is actually just shades of plain blue-gray. its literally just values making it look good bro

a lot of people think colors/color theory is the most important thing to learn for painting, and completely neglect values or treat them as “secondary”.

this likely goes against your initial gut artist feeling of wanting to have super bright saturated colors that “pop”, but a painting w/strong values and mid colors is basically always going to be “better” (from like. a technical perspective. obv you can do whatever you want forever) than a painting with weak values but bright colors that look good next to each other while flat

above on the left is a painting i did before i learned abt value, on the right is after. the left one has bright colors but the value sucks bad. the one on the right has colors some people might avoid because they look “muddy”, but stronger values

ofc that’s not to say you can’t have both, i’m just using that as an example to make my point. here’s a painting w/ much brighter colors

now he just stares into the sun...