lights and darks and shadow shapes

below are some images and notes from my colleague teneya simms' website. he runs the georgetown atelier next door. make note of some of the same things we have discussed about rendering form with lights and darks. 

also note in his second step of the demonstration drawing the lovely investigation of the shadow's shape and how it does so much to describe the unique series of anatomical forms that make up the human figure.  

in the last image you will see an example of relative values making values appear lighter/darker than they are. the reflective light appears to be lighter than it is because of what it is up against. this often gets rendered much too light, taking away the illusion of the shadow side of form. remember we can make the reflective light feel light by darkening the core and the cast shadow.

we are hedging a bit in our starts to our shadows to shadow shapes by establishing our darks as a unified darkness that first established the separation between shadow side versus light side (or what is tangent to light source) if we make our shadows all dark enough (not too dark) we have room to adjust our lights later and our darker darks, leaving the initial dark value to feel lighter. 

Some important concepts to understand:

Before moving forward, it’s necessary to address some key concepts and terms. Below is a ‘standard’ full value range sphere lit from the top-left, categorized in 9 values. Value number 1 is white and 9 is black. The light in this case hits the sphere most directly on the top left, making it a pure white value #1 and the ‘lightest light’. Moving along the surface of the sphere away from the light, it gradually becomes darker into the light-halftones, half-tones, dark half-tones, until finally reaching the core-shadow. The core-shadow is the point in which direct light no longer reaches the surface. In most circmstances there is some light that reflects back into the shadow shape, making core-shadow little darker then the reflected light. This is what creates the ‘band-like’, linear characteristic of a core-shadow. If there is no reflected light, everything beyond the core-shadow is black (the moon is an example of this, or in other more extreme lighting conditions).

Role of Rendering:

After accomplishing a solid block-in, i.e. all major ‘architectural’ and proportional problems are solved, you can ‘hand over the job to the rendering crew’.* A common suggestion offered in drawing is to ‘bring the whole things up together/at once’. If you’re working on a shorter pose (say 1 session), it makes sense to build your drawing this way. This helps achieve unity in the drawing. 

The sphere below expresses how the shadows can appear lighter then they actually are. #1 and #2 appear to be similar in value, but are not.