Light In Detail

First off sorry for not posting in here for so long but I just reciently got the internet again. But enough of that.

This summer I road my bike everywhere, this mainly consisted to and from work, but I road my bike everyday. I would ride the same route everyday and everyday I would notice something entirely new. Not only the strange people and events on the street, but like an entire building I've never seen before. This was always very remarkable to me. But one day while I was riding north on State the sun was shinning on everything in front of me and it eluminated every detail that could be seen. Even a mile or more ahead of me I could see the individual brick work in the buildings, the fixtures around the windows, I could even see into the windows and everything that was going on inside! This was a major thing I saw and I knew I had to figure out what I was seeing.

This photo fails to capture what I saw, but I realized then the nature of light. It's not, the more light the brighter things are, it's the more light the more details are revieled! Everyone should know how the basics of light works, light is produced by a source then is reflected off an object and into our eye. We have a limited range of colors that we can see so if we try and look into a source of light the details just kind of wash out into white color. White is the combination of all colors black is the absense of any color.

I, naturally, begain to apply this new lession to art. That if you have a character in the center stage with the lights on him bright then this one character should have the most details in him. But a trouble I find in my fields of comic books, illustration and animation is that all use very graphic styles of art. And that they mostly all dirive from ink on paper. In essense these images are nothing more then the colors black and white interplaying but never mixing. When trying to graphicly show shadows or value you do so with sold black marks (hatching, stipling, ect.) but unless you take a step away from graphic art and use an ink wash or paint you cannot create a natural shadow.

(image by Troy Nixey)

(image by Jason Reynolds)
The trouble is black is the lack of light, so your mind pegs it as shadow. And if you add a lot of detail to your main character and leave the back ground sparse, the main character will look "muddy" and heavy on the page while the background will draw your attention. This is a point that has been appled in reverse for years, where the main character is in less detail while the background has more. This way your eyes rest easily on the main character and advoid the white noise of the back ground.

(Tintin comics)
This is where the concept of light is bright, because when there is too much light thing tend to wash out and look simpler and blockier. It's really just there's more detail then we can precieve. The only way, it seems, to make your main character detailed you need to make the whole scene detailed. where you can use other tricks like color and line weight to distinguise the main character from the back ground.

(image by Geoff Darrow)

(image by Alex Ross)
Geoff Darrow and Alex Ross are two great comic artist that always put alot of details into every page. But their two style are strikingly different. Darrow's ink work tends to make the image look muddy as a whole, while Ross's paintings are very readable. rendering a scene for every pannel as Darrow and Ross do is a lugsury that most comic artist can't afford so many have to find differnt styles to push their work to higher forms. Choosing where to place details and leave them out is a very delicate process. But this is how many arist have made names for themselves.

(image by Frank Miller)

(image by Mike Mignola)
Frank Miller and Mike Mignola are two artist that really do good work with using light and not showing all the image. Both very graphic, I'm trying to stear away from painterly as graphic is most used. By seeing these piece you can tell that the artist knows what's in the blank areas from the amount of details around the edges. Here we see the principles of proportion and volum working their hardest. When they are in their right places we can assume as to what the blank areas are. Out of these two Mignola steps away from realism and moves more towards cartooning yet still keeping the detail. If we look towards animation we don't see this very much. As, in the Disnsey fashion, animated characters are all very cartoony. This is simply because it is very hard to get a room full of people to draw in the same way. Characters are kept simple and cartoony so can be drawn easily by any angle.

But if one were to take a more sophisticated aproach to light and the image it is showing you will yeild a more pleasing result. Now, nearly all cartoons are designed to have a graphic look to them. So when looking at the four types of detail revield by Darrow, Mignola, Miller, and Disney you have to appreciate the costs of making animation, that the level of detail that Darrow puts in, it would be of enormus costs to make that. Example, look at the Big Guy and Rusty TV show. Most everything was simplified. This points towards a style closer to Mignola's to show immense detail without having to show it all.

The way to approach this is you must know your character far more then you'll ever show. That you'll have model sheets that show in full turn around detail of the character, then make new model sheets with less detail to reflect the amount of light on him, then propotionitly less then less less so on untill you just have the silloette. With this you will be armed with the knowledge to have your character move from the shadows to candle lite room then an office building then raining lightning storm. The way that the shadows will fill in the cracks of details around the edges of them will imply and show just enough to tantalize audiances. Like this the same principles apply to the back ground as well.

But detail isn't just graphic line representations it's also color. But I think I'll save color for another post. This one was my first article I've ever written to be seen for a mass audience and I fear I may have been a bit to long winded and not focused on the end issue of detailed animation.