✹ART GUIDE✹ How I learned how to paint Colour & Light - Course, Book, Practice (Patreon)

Hello Patrons! 🤍

I will share some art guides that have helped my practice now and then! Today's guide is about How I learned how to paint Colour and Light. 🌼✨

Over the years, I learned to apply light and shadow to my work to create a visual story. I still want to learn many things regarding colour and light, but I wanted to share some of the courses, books, and practice I have done that have helped me improve my skills!

✹ Course ✹

When I used to work as a 2D artist in a small gaming company called MouseHunt, I was fortunate enough to take a Schoolism course with my coworkers. We took a class with Sam Nielsen called Fundamentals of Lighting.

This course breaks down the physical properties of light and matter. We learned how to treat different light sources and how lighting affects different materials and shadows.

If you’re like me and have difficulty following self-study lessons, I highly recommend the critiqued classes. You get homework after every lesson, and Sam would be able to do a paint-over and give feedback on your work. However, the self-study lessons are equally valuable, so I still recommend it!

Here’s some of the homework I’ve done:

I couldn’t fully grasp every aspect behind the properties of lighting. Still, after applying it to my job and practicing the methods I’ve learned, I slowly understood how to treat colour and light in different situations.

Here’s a sample of work I’ve done before taking the class:

And here’s the work I’ve done after taking the class:

After taking the class, I saw a shift in how my colour variation was a lot clearer, paint different materials and textures, and I was able to tackle different lighting situations.

✹ Book ✹

If I could recommend one art book, every artist should have it: the Colour and Light book by James Gurney! Most of the time, I think we are too focused on understanding the “hows:” How do we paint a sunset? How do we paint the shadows? How can we create a rim lighting?

However, this book explains the HOW and WHY.

This book details how and why different environments look a certain way on sunsets, evening sky, overcast, etc.

At that time, I wanted to elevate my work by painting backgrounds and environments for my characters. Having this book as a guide is quite helpful!

I occasionally go back to this book to remind myself how and why things work!

✹ Practice ✹

It’s important to apply methods I have learned from the course and book, so I wanted to practice these lessons by doing observational studies and painting.

I have to be honest, I didn’t do as many studies as I would have liked because I wanted to apply it straight to my illustration (I was eager to jump into painting environments already!)

The best way to ease myself into it was paint scenes that are familiar to me! So I began painting a series featuring Disney Princesses.

Doing these paintings along with studying how the scenes were stylistically painted helped me develop painting methods that aligned with how I want to tell my story.

I’ve always loved the stylistic style so studying and observing how other artists, animated films, paint these scenes has helped tremendously!

✹ Other Resources ✹

Here are some useful resources for learning Light and Colour:

Videos:

Why Color Studies Are so Powerful 

Understanding Color 

How to Paint Light and Shadow 

Youtube Channels

Ian Roberts 

James Gurney 

Courses

Dice Tsutsumi - Color and Light 

Kat Tsai - Color and Light 

Final Thoughts

It’s essential to practice and make a lot of of mistakes in the beginning! I used to avoid painting backgrounds because it always felt so daunting.

However, It’s important to question ourselves why do we avoid it? I think for the longest time, I avoided them because I simply didn’t know how to tackle lighting, how colours are affected during certain time, how to paint things in distance, and how do we paint characters in background. These things always felt overwhelming! Once I was able to take smaller steps and learn things little by little, I was able to tackle some of things that felt daunting without even knowing.

There’s still a lot of things I want to learn colour and lighting so I always make sure to challenge myself every now and then when I work on new pieces!

Thank you so much for taking the time to read! I hope this guide is useful! Let me know if you’re interested in more guides like this! 🥰🌼

Love always,

Maxine