Painting Workshop: Day 2: Shadows on Sphere

Today's workshop went over the shadows and atmospheric effects on landscapes. For the first part, we took a look at a basic orange sphere on a green table. The background wall was blue. In this sketch, you can see the direction of the light (indicated by the arrow being emitted by the "can").

The parts of the image:

A) This is the highlight. It's directly perpendicular to the light source and is generally the brightest spot on the sphere.

B) The green table is reflected onto the sphere.

C) The light that is reflected off of the wall is bounced onto the top of the ball. This produces a light rim effect of color on the sphere.

D) The light that is reflected off of the wall is bounced onto the green table.

E) The orange of the ball is reflected onto the dark shadow of the table.

F) The darkest part of the scene is where the ball interacts with the table. This contains the least amount of light.

G) The shadow on the sphere has the darkest part of the shadow away from the edge of the sphere and the edge of the light section. This is due to the fact that the edge of the sphere also contains reflected light and the edge of the light section contains a bit of the incident light.

In this demonstration, we notice that there is a lot of reflected light that affects the painting of the object. Depending on the amount and intensity of the light, it may be quite noticeable.