Keith Richards

As a departure, I've been doing some studies using famous musicians.  A caricature of Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones almost draws itself. What a face! This could be a good way to start learning to draw leather or craggy rock formations.

Just kidding.

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

More on Rendering Chrome

Chrome is a three dimensional mirror-like reflective surface. Chrome adopts its color entirely from its surroundings.  To render chrome from imagination you must choose the environment surrounding the object being constructed.

Blue sky and asphalt reflect clearly on the surface of chrome.

Since we usually see chrome on cars and since cars are usually outdoors and on the street, we commonly see the asphalt on the ground plane and blue sky above reflected onto the surface of the metal and reflected sharply back to our eyes.  A different environment would create a different colors.  For example, our car was parked in a grassy park during sunset (see below).

left to right: sunset w/grass, snow w/blue sky, and sunny day at the beach

The brightest light reflects of upward facing surfaces from the sky. The sun, if visible, creates a bright white highlight. On downward facing surfaces we see the ground reflected.  Distant objects reflect dramatically less light than the sky and appear almost black; the ground closest to the tire reflects light of brighter value, but still much darker than the sky.

Real world reflections are almost always more complicated than this since since any nearby object could be visible on a surface.  When rendering from photo reference or from real life, this knowledge can help you understand and even simplify your observations.

Now that we've talked about chrome, we can begin to talk about how reflective, colored surfaces react to their environment.

Try it out!

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

How to Use Color Intensity: 3 Digital Studies

Here are 3 rough photoshop studies I completed with my little Wacom Tablet that demonstrate some of the color chroma concepts I wrote about earlier this week. They really show clear color gradations. I hoped this might apply the idea creatively and also be a little more interesting than the cubes. 

The first (just below) was a study I referenced and caricatured from a Dean Cornwall painting that was posted over at the Gurney Journey.  I loved the color and key of the painting so much, I had to investigate.  You can see the bleaching effect best in his white shirt sleeves where the shadows have more chroma than the light side. More subtly you can see where his beard is slightly more brown in the mid-tone before the light's begin.

In the digital study of the face above is lit from above by low red-orange light. For the lightest lights I used the most saturated orange I could find.  In the two brightest highlights (in the nose and top of the head) I added white to lighten them further so they would punctuate the form stand out beyond the rest.

In this last invented face and lighting scheme, you can see the flesh tone graying toward the dark side and intensifying toward an orange in the light side.  The man's shirt goes through the same gradation.

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View my portfolio at: www.spencerhallam.com