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Light And Shadow: The History and Evolution of Shadow Theatre



Mimi Page Light & Shadow is the perfect hybrid of soft, angelic female solo vocals and lush, ethereal atmospheric sound-design, featuring the feather-light soprano voice of singer-composer Mimi Page. Designed for film & game composers/sound-designers, this collection includes a full selection of chromatic articulations, melodic phrases and exquisitely sound-designed cinematic effects, pads and atmospheric elements. The lead vocal content is intuitively playable and the phrases and effects are easy to use in any project, making this library an ideal source of inspiration that's perfect for nearly any music or video production need that comes your way. It all combines into a complete, efficient and deeply-refined toolbox that comes fully equipped with our flexible and full-featured user interface.


The characteristics of the cast shadow are dependent on the intensity of the light source. A hard light will produce a cast shadow with a sharp edge, a soft light will produce a cast shadow with a more blurry edge.




Light And Shadow.




The longer the cast shadow is from the object, the softer the edge of the shadow becomes. Notice how the cast shadow is darkest right underneath the sphere and then it gets lighter and lighter as it goes out further away from the light source.


Once you understand the basics of how light behaves, it is quite encouraging to think that a small amount of information can give you the knowledge needed to convincingly portray the illusion of form with any subject.


Hello Wiil, Your sphere has a very immediate weight and presence, which I am enjoying looking at. It is so good!! I shall give it a try as well. Appreciate your explanation of the light. Thank you! Lynne


I have just taken some of my work to a gallery for constructive criticism and was told to work on my lighting. Your lesson comes at a most opportune time for me. Thanks so much. Looking forward to the next lesson.


Thank you for this great lesson about understanding light. this is just what I need. I am hoping to order the portrait lessons soon. Will you be giving a lesson on how, what angles to put light on a live model to start portrait practise


Always a good lesson! It bears repeating over & over again for us beginners ! We usually just go for a gray shadow & forget about reflected light !! Thanks as always a good lesson from a great teacher.


Hi Will, This is very good explanations regarding light sources, shadow and reflection. Your explanation is superb, so simple and so clear. I really enjoy a lot and am looking forward to the second and the third parts. I appreciate very much your generosity, it helps me a lot to understand and looking forward to applying it in my painting. Nualnapa


I have used the periscope app one time in my life. There was a person drawing and we the observers were as present as if we had been in the room. I mention this because should you ever decide to hold a class where you taught about light and shadow I would like to be in attendance. Just a thought.


Claudia looks at a picture of Jonas, then opens blueprints for the nuclear plant, containing the God Particle, with a notation: "follow the signal". She enters the remains of the power plant, takes a torch and Geiger counter and approaches a light. Someone calls out "stop" and walks toward her: (teenage) Jonas.


Claudia asks Jonas what the light is. He tells her it was leftover from the catastrophe. The God Particle. He tells her there is no way back now as the passage was destroyed. But if he can find out how the machine works, he could go back in time to save Martha and Mikkel. Jonas asks how she found him and if she still has the apparatus. Claudia tells him she does but it does not work. Claudia says it might work next time but Jonas shouts he cannot wait 33 years to try again. He asks why her older self had never told him anything, knowing Martha would die and wonders why he should trust her now. She tells him she knows what the material at the power plant is, and can help him save Martha and everybody else.


The deaf-mute Franziska asks (signs) Magnus what he thinks the birds, light, and boy in the bunker mean. He tells her Martha thinks the apocalypse will happen that day but she is crazy. Franziska tells him if they die that day, they would die together, which Magnus agrees with and they kiss.


It's very common for painting tutorials to treat light as an addition to the picture, an atmosphere-maker. We can easily get the impression that the object has a universal form, and then with proper lighting we can change the mood of the picture. The truth is without light there would be nothing to paint! Until you realize that, you're shooting blind.


Let's go back to the fundamentals of optics. A light ray hits an object and bounces to your eye. Then the signal is processed by your brain and the image is created. That's pretty well-known, right? But do you realize all the consequences that stem from that process?


So, light comes from the left lower corner, roughly. The problem is it's not a point light, so we don't have the nice, sharp shadow that's the easiest and most intuitive to draw. Drawing rays like this doesn't help at all!


But wait, if light doesn't touch the area, how can we see something that is in shadow? How can we see anything on a cloudy day, when everything is in the shadow of the clouds? That's the result of diffused light. We'll talk more about diffused light throughout this tutorial.


Painting tutorials usually treat direct light and reflected light as something totally different. They may tell you there's a direct light that makes surfaces bright, and that reflected light may occur, giving a bit of light to the shadow area. You might have seen diagrams similar to the one below:


This isn't completely true, though. Basically everything you see is reflected light. If you see something, it's mostly because light has reflected from it. You can see direct light only if you're looking directly at the light source. So the diagram should look more like this:


While specular reflection creates a perfect image of the reflected object thanks to the correct angle, diffuse reflection is far more interesting. It's responsible for color (we're going to talk about this in more details in the next part of this series) and it lights up the object in a softer way. So, basically, it makes an object visible without burning your eyes out.


Materials have various factors of reflection. Most of them will diffuse (and absorb) a huge part of the light, reflecting only a small part as specular. As you probably already guessed, glossy surfaces have a higher factor of specular reflection than matte ones. If we look at the previous illustration once again, we can create a more correct diagram for it:


When looking at that image, you may be under the impression that there's only one point on a glossy surface where specular reflection occurs. That's not completely true. It occurs wherever light hits the surface, but there's only one specular ray hitting your eyes at a time.


Here's a simple experiment you can do. Create a light source (use your phone, or a lamp) and place it so that it lights up a shiny surface from above and creates a reflection. It doesn't need to be a very strong or vivid reflection, just make sure you can see it. Now take a step back, looking at the reflection the whole time. Can you see how it moved? The closer to the light source you are, the more acute the angle. Seeing the reflection directly under the light source is impossible, unless you are the light source.


We need to explain that loss. Why can the light from very, very distant stars come to your eyes without larger disruptions, but buildings a few miles away lose details and contrast? It's all about atmosphere. You see a thinner layer of air when looking up than when looking ahead, and the air is full of particles. The rays traveling to your eyes at a big distance hit these particles and lose a bit of information. At the same time, these particles may reflect something else to your eyes - mainly blue of the sky. In the end, you'll see a leftovers of the original signal mixed with impurities - it looks bright, but it brings little original information and a lot of noise.


Edges (lines) are a side effect of a proper lighting on the picture. If your painting looks flat and you need to draw outlines to bring attention to the shapes, you're doing it wrong. Lines should appear on their own as borders between two different values, so they're based fully on contrast.


What does perspective have to do with shading? More than one could think. Perspective is a tool to draw 3D objects in 2D without making them look flat. Since they're 3D, light strikes them in various ways, creating highlights and shadows.


Now that's a different story! The object looks 3D despite the simple, flat shades we've added. How does that work? The first object has one wall visible, so for the observer it is actually one flat wall, and nothing else. The other object has three walls, and we know 2D objects don't ever have three walls. The sketch itself looked 3D to us, so it was very easy to picture the parts that light can or can't touch.


Although it may seem obvious, the main lesson you need to take from this is: the stronger the light, the sharper the terminator. Therefore, a sharp terminator is an indicator of some kind of artificial light source. To avoid it, always blur the area between light and shadow.


Once you've realized what seeing really is, photography doesn't seem so different from painting. Photographers know that it's light that makes a picture, and they can use it to change what they want to show. It's said that nowadays photos are too "photoshopped", but the truth is a photographer rarely takes a picture of something as-is. They know how light works and they use it to create a more attractive picture, and that's mainly why an expensive camera doesn't automatically make one a professional photographer. 2ff7e9595c


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