 Hi there, it's Sandy Olnock and today I'm going to do a study on backlighting for a specific reason. I've got a new class that's just come out and it's called Island Time. It's a mini class with five lessons on different scenes that you could use for islands. And this is, of course, all the minis are focused on scenes that would be great for card makers and that sort of thing. They could learn from these, of course, and scale them up to whatever size you'd like them to be. But since some of these scenes, as you can tell, have the sun off in the distance. I was very wistful and thinking of sitting on the beach looking out at sunrise and sunset and midnight and just drinking in the island vibes. And these images are probably going to require some backlighting because backlighting means that the light source is not where you're standing as the viewer. The light source is on the other side of the object. So you're basically seeing the dark side of the moon here. You're seeing the dark side, the shadow side of the animal or the figure or whatever it is that's in your picture. So the lighting, you have to figure out how to backlight it so that it looks like the light is on the opposite side. How do you do that? Well, for most people when they start to draw a pelican into a picture like this, they will do what I'm doing right now, which is look at your reference, put your features in, get your colors in there, that sort of thing. And you can certainly start that, and I often will start a drawing like this, doing that, knowing that I'm going to completely wreck it and it's going to scare you and I just want you to be calm and breathe because it'll be fine. But the pelican has a yellowish cap on the head, a white neck, and the body of this, I think it's a California brown pelican that I chose, is going to be browns and grays and lots of feathers and things. So normally you could just go right through and draw the whole pelican, but it looks in this view as though there is a light behind the viewer shining on this pelican because this side is nice and bright. So I'm going to do the scary thing now and I'm going to cover the whole thing in a number six gray. And for me, what I have found is that when I do backlighting, if I don't get bold with it, if I don't really tackle it and just go as far as my courage can take me, then it looks really weak. So this, compared to the darks in the scene, look at the darks in that fence. This does not look like it fits in there. So I need to start darkening things. But I'm going to put in some of the details first in the feathers because the feathers were really distinctive in the photograph and I wanted to have some really nice feather looking shapes. But they're going to be darks within darks because this is, remember, the dark side of the pelican. And even though it was scary to throw all that gray over there, you can see how light it is compared to the actual darks in the picture. You always need to scale it to whatever your picture is using. If your fence is really light and there's no nice, heavy darks in your scene, then you can get away with doing something lighter for the shading on a backlit image like this. But since mine has really good contrast in the picture itself, I need to match that kind of contrast in the feathers and everything else. So I knew that even though I'm putting all this detail in, I'm going to cover it up again. But when I cover it, I'm just going to cover it with lighter colors than what I'm using right now. This is black I'm using, so I'm going to go in with some grays and browns. But I'm going to let some of those darks within darks show. If you end up choosing incorrectly and all of your detail goes away, then by all means go over it again with the darks and really darken those darks. I did leave the eye a little bit lighter and the beak a little bit lighter. But now for the backlighting tricks is to have almost a halo, not complete halo around the entire image. But I'm softening that white edge that I've left by using a number one gray. And when I say a number one and a number six, use whatever you can use. Use cool swarms. I don't really care. But just use a light gray that can lighten some of the areas. So if there are areas that you went too far, you can lighten them with that. Or you can darken some of them if they got too bright. You can go back into some of those grays and brighten some of the colors. So I put a little bit more of an orangey color in the head so that it reflects the fact that it had yellow on the head of the bird. Because when it's in shadow, you're not going to see a bright yellow. The feet then are gray. So I'm going to leave some highlights on the tops of the feet and on the two legs as they go up to the bird. And that stump that he's standing on, which I have no idea why my stump is in the middle of a path, but it is. And that's just the way my picture is. I need to start to darken that as well because it needs to fit with everything. Even though in my picture, it was a very light, very pale color. It was a super light gray type of post. I need to make it fit with the picture. The amount of contrast needs to fit so I can change it. Remember, we're artists. We can change things if we want to. And don't worry, there's like an eighth of an inch that you're missing at the bottom of the drawing. I did not realize when I was filming this that I was a little slid down off camera. But you can see how it's getting that really nice glow around the pelican now. The shadows for things like the fence all point towards where the sun is. So if you pretend there's a string going from the sun to the base of whatever the object is that you're putting a shadow on, it's going to go in that direction. And if there's a hillside, there's a little curve to this hillside as it goes down to the beach. There's going to be a little curve to the shadows. Sometimes, though, like I tried to make some of my fence posts stop so that you can see the top of the shadows, but it looked awkward. So when you've got a shadow that looks awkward and there are some shadows that will look awkward, I'll show you some cards in just a moment. Then you can kind of see that there's a problem with the edge of it. Just like, what do you do with the edge of it? Well, darken it. Just darken it like I did, and it melts into the background there and then becomes a non-issue because that's not an important part of the drawing. So I just make that disappear. If you, like me, were not completely successful in leaving a really nice white that you're happy with around the outside edges, that glow, then you can certainly use a white pen to start adding some of that back in. If you want some sunshine glow on those white areas, then wait for the ink to dry and then you can throw a little bit of a yellow marker over it so you get some golden glow, or if it's nighttime, you can throw some blue on there and get a blue glow, that kind of thing. With stamped images, they're really tiny, so be really careful. You can easily go overboard and it'll look like a giant outline. Notice how it comes and goes and doesn't actually outline the entire figure. It's just around parts of it and I'm letting some of them drop off and some of them pick up almost like the bird is turning and there's different parts of him picking up the sun as it's casting across the image. So to finish off, I'm adding some dots in a dark brown as well as dots in white and that picture is all done. So let's take a look at three cards that I made. This is from a stamp set that Art Impressions came out with that I thought would be appropriate for this. This first card has just one of the seagulls and I stamped the seashell so that they were standing up. So they're standing vertically and created shadows for them. I also made the fence as in the lessons so that I could practice doing that. The sun has moved over a little bit so I had to figure out where each of the shadows was going to go and when you have something like a bird that has two legs, it really helps to make it realistic if you can have those two legs be separated just a little bit. Notice that all of these shadows drop off into a dark area so that I didn't have to worry about how to end them. It's really hard to know that and this is an intermediate class that I'm talking about doing this for so I don't want to drive you crazy with trying to figure out how these shadows should actually be shaped. The next one has a whole group of these seagulls and they're all dressed funny and they're holding different tools and there's like all kinds of things they have on their heads, french fries and pails and sunglasses and things but most of that is gone because now they're a silhouette of this group of birds all dressed funny and all of those shadows come down from them. You can see all their legs as pairs and then the top of the shadow drops off. I just have lumps for their bodies so that kind of eliminated the need to have to work out all those shapes but notice that I don't have white outlines around every single bird. It's just around portions of them here and there so that I get some highlights. This third one is pelicans which is what inspired the big pelican drawing and one of the pelicans is standing on the ground so has the shadows from the feet sticking out and then a beak that is full of presence. It's just kind of a weird thing that the pelican will deliver presents by carrying them in his beak but the other pelican has a flaming cake in its mouth. I don't know if it was supposed to be on fire but I made it on fire. This is a daredevil pelican but he's jumping up in the air so his shadow doesn't start until way later. It doesn't come down right below him because the sun is coming all the way across and only showing that shadow when it reaches across where the pelican is. So anytime you've got a figure that is up in the air the shadow is gonna be offset in some way based on the location of the sun. This one was super challenging to do to figure out how to make those flames work with the background and that is a whole nightmare that took me forever to figure out but I hope that this was helpful to you especially if you're gonna be a student in the class so you can do a little backlighting of your own and I will see you all in the next video. Take care, bye bye.