Chiaroscuro from Observation

 

 I took a walk today in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn.  I couldn't help taking a photo of this decorative cement sphere that guards the top of the steps. It shows nearly textbook chiaroscuro. Also, if you look close enough you can find the Empire State Building in the background.

 On the brightness of the reflected son has overloaded my wimpy cellphone camera and therefore bleached out the light side of the value range (my eyes could). A core shadow is hardly visible because the dark side is illuminated by the ambient light from the clear blue sky. Also, there is no visible highlight since the surface isn't smooth enough to reflect an image of the light source.

You can see that the texture of the surface is most apparent between the lightest lights at left and the shadow at right. This is so for 2 reasons: First, at nearly tangent angles of light, the surface bumps are casting their own tiny shadows.  Secondly, the mid-tone gives us the most detailed look at the surface since less light would limit the amount of light reaching our eyes and extreme daylight can bleach the light side.

At bottom right you can see a little bit of reflected light bouncing into the underside of the ball. Also, since there is so much ambient light, which lightens up the cast shadow, you can see that the occlusion shadow on the ball becomes emphasized. It looks like a black line around the edge of the ball.

Visit my Chiaroscuro Lesson to find out more details about drawing spheres.


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View more of my artwork at: www.spencerhallam.com