CGMythology's Sketchbook

[Fedodika]

so, when i was working on my raven piece a few years ago, i would have stopped around where youre at now but thanks to some feedback i just kept pushing what was possible with the lighting.

Find your lightsource, deck that out, then make a shadow source of that makes sense. The human brain we dont give it enough credit for pattern recognition. It doesnt take but a second to realize its a gold helmet, we often associate that shape itself with a gold helmet. really in a painting only about 5% of an object has to have some shiny gold on it for it for it to read as that type of helmet.

Often if youre in doubt, imagine the stripe of light, multiply layer the whole thing and erase out of a thin grey tone a light and build on that. Ive found just lowering everything and pulling one thing out gives me lots of ideas about focus and contrast. 

Also rapoza does this trick a lot is the sweaty piece of metal. He'll have most stuff in shadow and one little lit up area on metal thats got lots of little highlights and wear. It makes everything feel more metal since the rest feels less metal if that makes sense. 

You dont have to light everything with a strong direct light and then back light everything. The silhouette is strong enough you could just have this be entirely black and we'd still know what we're looking at. So play with this idea and keep pushing this piece past just rendering all the forms, tell a story with the light and use texture strategically. A lot here, and the rest is blurred out there. We'll still get the idea despite there not being a texture brush on every inch of the canvas. Take a look at some like magic illustrations for example they do this a lot as well