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Jingsketch Mini Tutorial - Basics + Lighting
Jingsketch Mini Tutorial - Basics + Lighting
Jingsketch Mini Tutorial - Basics + Lighting
Teaching
I love teaching illustration and have had the opportunity to
teach a variety of students. I taught illustration courses at
Woonsocket High School, co-taught a preclinical medical
illustration course at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown
University, and founded illustration clubs at Lexington High
School and Brown University.
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Jingsketch
Process Overview
I’m going to begin by describing my general process
when approaching digital painting.
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look. I’m really careful at this stage as
Sketch Layer well, and I make sure that there are few
to no mistakes. I’ve found that it is
I always start each painting with a
much harder to fix something the further
sketch. I am not comfortable going
along you are in a digital painting,
straight into brush-strokes and shapes,
especially if you are an artist who takes
so what I do is create a simple sketch
advantage of numerous layers.
first, such as the one shown below.
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While painting lights, I have my subject
Adding Lines Again Lighting selected so that I don’t paint outside of
the lines.
After this stage of the painting, I create a Now I move onto my favorite part of
new layer and create new lines that are each of these paintings — lighting. The
Finally, I’ll add overlay layers to correct
clean and smooth, setting the layer way I used to approach lighting for
the colors and to find a mood that I
blending mode to either multiply or these painting was to use pure white rim
resonate with... and that’s it! This is a
linear burn. I make sure to never draw lighting. I usually set these layers to the
simplified version of my process. You
a line on the outline of an object, though add blend mode or the normal blend
can dissect the specifics by looking
this part is entirely personal preference. mode. Then, I’d duplicate this white rim
through my original files.
See what I mean below. It’s subtle. lighting layer and Gaussian Blur it by
15-20% and set it to around 30%
opacity. This way, your strong light has a
halo around it that glows.
Line layer turned off. Rim lighting before duplicated blurred layer.
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Portrait Lighting
With these paintings, I explored how to paint different
lighting schemes with one subject. I began by painting a
girl in a neutral light, and with each new lighting scheme,
I used the same strategy to create dynamic lighting.
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Painting Process
To light this portrait, I consistently used two kinds of layers —
multiply and add. The multiply layers were used to darken the
portrait enough to where lights added would pop, and the add
layers would be painted as lights in the scene.
Repeatable
Swipe through the images to the right to understand how I
organized my layers and how I used them to create believable
lighting schemes.
The add layer that was added in next could be any color that
makes you happy. For me, I imagined that a gold and blue
color scheme would work well since the two colors act
synergistically together as they’re basically complimentary.
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Repeatable (cont.)
Because this strategy is repeatable, to the right you can flip
through a gallery of different lighting schemes that I came up
with. Each of them was very easy to arrange.
Subtle Differences
You might run into times where your lighting doesn’t look
believable even though the values are there. That’s when you
have to start thinking about the way that light hits your eyes.
For example, when you create a visible direct bright light, there
is going to be a glow around it called a light halo. And if you
light a person or something organic, there might be a bright
ring of saturated color around where the light hits called
subsurface scattering. On the following page, those
concepts will be explained and illustrated.
Scheme 1. Neutral
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Lighting Tips
When it comes to lighting, there are subtle things that really
push it further. Here are 2 practical techniques that, in my
opinion, are really important to nail down. I use them in
almost every single one of my illustrations.
Light Halos
When strong light hits your eyes, it’s often surrounded by an
intensely saturated ring of color. By having a saturated ring of
color around a bright area, your eyes instinctively squint as if
hard lights were hitting them. Shown to the right is a light
without this glow. It looks more flat, even though the values are
correct. When you go to the next image, you’ll see what a glow
around a light source does to improve the believability of the
lighting. Use a hard light or an add layer here.
Subsurface Scattering
In the world of rendering, a phenomenon called subsurface
scattering is often the secret to creating a realistic organic
surface. By having a bright light shine on a surface of an
object, the reverse surface of the object will glow with intense
saturation. This is evident especially in skin as the capillaries
carrying blood underneath are illuminated. To the right, I’ve
illustrated this concept with the back of the girl’s ear. To
achieve this look, simply use a color dodge layer set to a
saturated red-orange. Without light halo.
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Thank you!
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