The Ultimate Guide to Drawing by Barrington Barber

Author:Barrington Barber [Barber, Barrington]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Practical Art
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing

The light coming from precisely side on produces a dramatic effect, with strong, well marked shadows to the left giving a sharp-edged effect to the shadowed area.

The three-dimensional aspect of the girl’s head is made very obvious by lighting coming from directly above, although the whole effect is softer than in the previous example. The shadows define the eyebrows and cheekbones and gently soften the chin and lower areas of the head.

Lighting the face from the front and to one side (as advocated by Ingres) gives a very even set of shadows – in this example on the right side – and clearly shows the bone structure.

You don’t have to invest in expensive equipment to achieve satisfactory results: several anglepoise lamps and large white sheets of paper to reflect light will do very nicely.

Lighting from behind the subject has to be handled very carefully and while it can produce very subtle shadows there is a danger of ending up with a silhouette if the light is too strong. Usually some sort of reflection from another direction creates more interesting definitions of the forms.

The only directional lighting that is not very useful is lighting from beneath the face, because light from below makes the face unrecognizable, which rather defeats the point of a portrait.

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