Light / colors : 4 simple case studies to know

In this article you'll see

Light / colors : Does light affect the colors or the opposite ? 

Light / colors work together. You can learn many technics to improve your digital painting. But if you don't understand the core process, it's like hitting the water with the best sword. lot of painters like james gurner writed books called : color and light. let's see how light affect colors in different situations : 

Sunlight case

If the local color of our object is red. Without taking in account the reflectivity of the material. Then here's what happen : The number of steps the red go to yellow depend on the intensity of light. The more the natural light is intense, the more the red change and go to yellow. Here in this example it goes until orange because the light is intense. But not super intense to the point of selecting yellow in the color swatch.

Cold light (red)

in this example. The color is cooler (red cold) the saturation of the local color will not change that much even in intense light, it has to be real intense one (and it's rare ) generally what happen is that it moves from cold color to cold yellow light.Now, if the light source is not that saturated. you may expect the red will become less saturated and more yellowish right ? No. what happen is that red will shit to orange but not really strongly because saturation of yellow is not really intense and it has an influence on intensity. a cool lightsource will desaturate the local color and make it more cold rather than moving it toward blue. 

Conclusion

You can learn more on lightsource by visiting some of the reference we gathered for you : 

• How light affect colors 
• How to draw cast shadow