JyonnyNovice - from Novice to Master!

[JyonnyNovice]

This is what I've been up to the last few days mainly, went back to the beginning of the How to Render book and redoing all the exercises in digital (up to page 43 so far), trying to choose correct values - all painted straight, no blending modes or adjustment layers, just paint. Some are better than others, but I figured out my mistakes I think.

The candle one is a bit off - shadows should be much, much softer and lighter in value, the fourth one the light to dark value difference is too great and the last diving board looking one I mixed up the light direction and got a weird looking shadow but the others seem pretty ok to me. Not too concerned with accurate reflected light and gradation in the shadows yet, just trying for solid construction and values so far.



EDIT

Actually I dunno about the last image now... Mr Gurney says that if there is full sunlight, a white in shadow is darker than a black in light, which isn't the case in my image. I followed the 'halfway to black' rule, which Scott Robertson explains, my white was 100 on top, so shadow side was 50 (halfway to black), yet my black was already down to value 32 or so in the light side (halfway to black 15/16 in the shadow part)... guess I should've made my 'black' a much higher value in the fully lit part.