Exercise 1: Seeing Light and Color
Goals:
Materials:
Part 1: Seeing Light and Shadow in grey scale
Place the round object a few inches from one side of the set up box.
- Practice looking at light and shadow.
- Analyze how lighting influences the shape (soft/hard), color (hue) and value (darkness/brightness) of light and shadow in a scene.
- Sketch/Paint what you see
- If you'd like to review the terms hue, value & saturation see this video in our Color science lesson.
Materials:
- Create a Set Up Box – Any material (paper, poster board, or even fabric) to create 2 sides and a bottom
- A round object such as a styrofoam ball, baseball, etc.
- Colored object such as construction paper, fabric, or even a book cover (red, blue and yellow)
- Pencil & paper
- Phone or camera to take pictures
- Paint, crayons, or colored pencils – black, white, red, yellow, blue
Part 1: Seeing Light and Shadow in grey scale
Place the round object a few inches from one side of the set up box.
Position the lamp on your set up so that it creates distinct shadows on and around the ball.
Take a photo with your phone and print that photo.
Take a photo with your phone and print that photo.
Trace the outline (using pencil, pen or marker) of at least 8 distinct shadow shapes.
Identify which is the lightest shadow, the darkest shadow and all of the gradations between.
Sketch out the areas of shadow to match the level of darkness (known as value) that you see.
Sketch out the areas of shadow to match the level of darkness (known as value) that you see.
Optional Part 2: Color
Do the same exercise as above but this time add colored paper to the sides of the set up box and see how color influences the white ball and its shadows.
Take a photo, print and trace the outlines as before. You must observe the regions of light and shadow very carefully.
Use colored pencils to fill in the shapes in order to match the color in your image as best you can.