Back to Lighting Magic: The Dolphin
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On to Lighting magic - part three

2. Face

After ogling the sketch for a while, I decided that the face was as good a place as any to start coloring. Normally it’s advisable to block in colors in the entire figure at this stage or so, but since I’ve decided to keep it purplish all over, I figured it wasn’t necessary. An important note – at this stage (well actually already at the concept stage, but at this stage, too) the main lightsource has already been decided upon. It’ll be the dolphin spirit that the kid is holding. There’ll also be ambient lighting, some blue lighting reflected from the kid’s armor and hair-to-be.

The shading for the face is somewhat unusual in that I left the background color in, and started by defining the highlights. Then, I started blending and refining until it started taking shape. Since I did the mistake of omitting clear construction lines, I decided to do each level of refinement on a new layer, so that I could check back with the previous stage to see if I haven’t messed something up too much. Also note that I approached the highlights themselves in a gradual manner, starting from the dimmest, evening it out, then going to smaller and lighter. The brush size decreased along with that, to allow better control of the process. At some point I decided the mouth just wasn’t cutting it, and resized it to fit the face better.

Lighting from below the chin is quite a pain in the back, but there are certain points about it that are easily overlooked and help when kept in mind. For one, the lower lids will get some light cast on them unless the lighting angle is so extreme that pretty much all the face is black, minus the very chin. Also, in most cases the bridge of the nose will be lit at least somewhat. The same goes for the upper lip directly under the nose – even though it seems that it should be in the shadow, the tilt of the lip gradually changes, so in most cases there will be some light falling there. Also, area near the very corners of the mouth will be dark, whereas under usual lighting from the top, it would have highlights. And last, but not least, make sure to place the primary highlights on the eyes near the bottom of the pupil, and the secondary ones – near the top, opposite of how they would appear in daylight.

Back to Lighting Magic: The Dolphin
Back to Lighting magic - part one
On to Lighting magic - part three