How do you avoid the 'pick-local-colour-and-shade-dark/light' colouring way...?

[VulpineVampiress]

I'm not sure if I made that sound clear...heheh...:dur:

I've got some really great suggestions and crits regarding this....in one of Prom's tutorials, I read somewhere while he was talking about one of his pictures 'each shape has just gotten the shadow and highlight treatment.' This got me thinking....cos I have been using this technique for all my pics...and I have noticed that my results look 'fly-swatted' and flat instead of 3Dish.

I usually work with penciled linearts, and colour them in using the usual 'Multiply' method, then try to render shapes out from underneath the lineart using 'dark/light' shades. It works....but the results are just horrid. Several have told me to pay attention to light, which I now do now....but something seems missing, but I'm not sure of what it is....

All my pics end up horrendously dark in the end. And flat. Miserably flat. *shame*

Can anyone tell me how to apply realistic shadow/lighting techniques...? Giving me refrence photos or anything of that sort would really help, and pointing little details I should know of (I'm totally in the dark regarding that now....eheh! *hides off* )

Thanks for your time!

[FlipMcgee]

Can't access your deviant album so I'm just basing this feedback from the one anthro art you've posted.

Nice lighting scheme in that one but you've actually chosen to flood a lot of the shadow areas in dark monochromatic tones. You can have some colors other than very dark ones in shadows you know, to further indicate those shaded forms and textures.

The light-shadow relationship that you have for the character reads (to myself, at least) as basicaly just two values. Missing a lot of half tones that would communicate better the roundness of the forms (i.e. limbs, or even fur texture). The lit areas look like massive highlights for me. Like he's lit with flood lights or some light source caused by a flash (like from an explosion, for example) that produced such high contrast.

Hopefully, this helps a little bit. Checkout the "Best of CA" or the Art History forums here. Should be a lot of samples in those, with effective and dramatic light-shadow relationships.

Also check out Marc Taro's tutorial: http://www.marctaro.com/GoodEvil/convert_01.html or http://www.marctaro.com/GoodEvil/good_evil_development.html

Find out how he went from here: http://www.marctaro.com/GoodEvil/Cover_MEO_WIP_Grey_X.jpg To here: http://www.marctaro.com/GoodEvil/MEO_goodevil_02_X.jpg

[Vincent Hammet]

thx for the links man :) .

And, if you final piece is so dark at the end. Play with hue/light values on photoshop. So many pro do it and the results are far better.

[Idiot Apathy]

Honestly I think its more about your choice in lighting. It's like flash photography, light almost everywhere.

Give yourself a definite lightsource and go from there; flesh out your shadows first. Think about say how the head might have a shadow on the shoulders; or the nose casting a shadow on a cheek or something.

Throw me some fairly simple lines and I'll try and show you a little better; a picture is worth a thousand words right?