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First came line, then shape, then perspective and proportion, now here's my favorite part of drawing: Light and Shadow. Without light and shadow even the most perfectly executed drawing
with perfect perspective and right-on proportion is going to look flat. Light and shadow give a "real world" depth to
a drawing and really makes it look three dimensional. The
drawings that we create now will really POP out of the paper
with light and shadow drawn in. We see shadows every day, but we really don't LOOK at them. We don't look at the shadow to try and figure out where the light is coming from, or how many light sources there are, or what
the quality of the light is. How you draw your shadows will tell all of that to the viewer, and if the shadow is drawn wrong, the viewer will know that the drawing is "wrong" but they may not understand why.
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Here's a classic example of "wrong" shadows: Look at this photo of John F. Kennedy's
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. People say this photo has not been doctored or retouched, but I think it has. Look at the shadows in the photo. Look at the shadow under his nose. This type of shadow occurs when the sun is very high in the sky (around noon) and the sun is shining straight down on the head. Yet, if this picture was taken around noon, Oswald would cast almost no shadow with his body because his body shadow would be directly under him. But, as you can plainly see, he DOES have a shadow. Granted, the shadow isn't very long, but it seems too long to be the same shadow that is being cast under his nose. Also, if we look at highlights in this picture we see that the highlights (or white areas) on his face are much better defined than the highlights on his right arm. Basically, there ARE NO highlights on his arm, it's all one pretty even tone. Further, his face has the three types of tone that we look for in drawing:
Highlights (the whitest whites), midtones (the middle,
grayer tones), and shadows (the darkest areas). But his right arm only seems to have two tones: shadows and midtones, no highlights. This means to me that the body was photographed under different lighting conditions than the head.
All right, I'm not trying to say who did or did not kill
Kennedy, I just know that this photo has wacky shadows that are
"wrong" which you can see if you look closely. When you
draw, you should be very aware of your lights and shadows and
keep in mind where they're coming from so you can keep them consistent
throughout your drawing.
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