Evaluation

The aim of this project was to better understand colour and lighting of a scene to convey mood through practical lighting experiments. I experimented with a variety of media to produce maquettes and models to use as lighting reference. I also looked into the technical and theoretical aspects of the subject of colour and lighting to better inform myself when it came to constructing the maquettes themselves.
I created a variety of maquettes from different materials and through process of elimination I arrived at lighting an outdoor scene, looking at examples of the way in which some of my favourite landscape painters have used light and time of day to convey mood. I decided to make a scale model of my chosen composition to photograph in natural outdoor lighting. Through my practical experimentation I arrived at the stage of making up colour roughs of the three variations of a scene to see how they read differently. Although I would have liked to have painted them up completely, I feel that I have learnt much of what I could have learnt by getting to this stage in the process. If I were to continue further I would place figures in the scene to see how interactions and narratives can be read differently in different light and colour schemes.
Further experiments I would have liked to do during the process would be to employ the knowledge of creating a gamut mask that I learned from James Gurney's tutorials and publications, to see more specifically how colour  affects a composition. I would also like to have made more detailed models of my faun figures and light them for more detailed imagery.
Overall, I feel like I have learnt a great deal from this investigation into light and colour, and it is definitely and area I would look into further in improving the quality of my work. I would also be likely to employ the use of maquettes for lighting reference for future pieces as I felt this was a very informative exercise.

Colour Roughs

Above are my colour roughs for the three different lightings of the same scene. As you can see, the way lighting of the time of day, as well as the way shadows fall has a great effect on how a scene is interpreted. The top composition with direct sunlight creates the impression of a pleasant, normal, everyday setting; the overcast lighting creates the impression of a dull, dreary place, that is either a boring place to be in, or something sad is taking place; the night time scene can either be read as creepy or giving the implication of a metropolitan place with a night culture. 

Black and White Roughs

 To better understand my physical experiments with lighting a scene I have done black and white rough studies of how some of the most effective lighting schemes effect the way you read the composition. In the compositions on the right, large shadows are being cast, creating dramatic effects. Lighting schemes with large shadows being cast over the scene have a sense of drama and create an ambiguous and mysterious mood in the piece. The compositions on the right have smaller amounts of shadow and create areas of interest in where shadow does and does not fall, here the areas of shadow could be used to narrative effect in placing certain characters and interactions in these shadows to imply something of what is taking place. I feel that this exercise has been helpful in creating options for how I want to light a scene and is definitely something I would try again in future compositions to aid in the single image storytelling that I prefer.
Next I want to use some of these lighting schemes together with the various colour palettes of the times of day I outlined in a previous post to see how this effects the mood of the scenery.