Dynamic Light Painting

Dynamic Light Painting, or chiaroscuro, involves painting usually from dark to light and with a light source that is well defined and obvious.

I've learned a lot from Anthony Jones using this method, and tried to see what I could do with Photoshop. The very first painting involved a human torso. From there, I continued on to paint a pair of arms and a helmet. I ended up changing my mind and painted a pair of of icy arms and a icy headpiece, as if both the arms and the headpiece naturally grew on him with a mask to cover his face. Due to the fact that the painting was in black and white (also known as value painting), I used a color brush to give him life:

I continued on with this knowledge on a character named Zi. Here I painted more flesh and started liking this mottled brush I had. Although the brush looked like a mess, it was a perfect sampler for my brain to work with and stimulate my sense of values in real-time speeds. My mind took too much time into the flesh that it didn't think about the ambient values. If you focus on one area, your mind will start to trick itself. Lesson learned:

Eventually I tried to see if my favorite brush, the splatter brush, was going to work things through. I'm used to drawing on grey paper with graphite, and elevate the values in that sense. And with a brush that splatters like graphite, lowering the flow and opacity percentages and focusing on pressure sensitivity, I was getting closer to how I work with real life mediums. The understanding of values in this painting involved painting metal. Even though metal wasn't on my mind when I started it out. It began with a painting of splatters, and then a solid black block. I eventually tried to paint a body protruding out of the block, and it ended up being an armor-bodied character, with sharp ends for hands and feet.

And that's pretty much it. Studying values eventually became a big hobby of mine. However, while I'm improving my sense of values, I will eventually need to improve my sense of color!

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