Hello whomever it is reading my blog!

Welcome to my website. For those who don't know me I am an artist and instructor at the Schuler School of Fine Arts. One of the classes I teach is figure drawing/painting.  We begin the semester with gestures and block in methods, progress into short poses, then to Alla Prima poses (1 full class) and finally to multi week poses. Moonlit started as an Alla Prima but I decided to continue the pose into another class. I told them I would demonstrate something creative on the next sitting. Here is the finished Alla Prima sitting:

The idea of the second sitting was to show the process of completely changing the light source. This is an important skill to learn. If you're making up a realistic figure for a painting or drawing it is vital to be able to create a believable illusion of light and shadow. It is also completely necessary when combining several references that each have different illumination. Some or all of the light directions must be converted to have everything in the composition lit the same way.  
When changing the character of the light the artist must completely understand the volume of the object/model/area bring depicted. In the case of a figure, the study of anatomy as well as practicing figure drawing from a wide variety of poses and lighting greatly helps for this. Sculpture training, in my opinion, is the absolute best way to learn three dimensional form. 
In this demonstration I decided to alter the light source from a direction from upper left, to lower right (11pm on the clock to 5am), to a lower left to upper right orientation (7 o'clock to 1). I also converted the temperature of the light from warm to very cool.

This was really risky to do as a class demonstration. It is difficult enough to pull off a radical change like this. I decided to do it live for the students. I have flopped in front of classes plenty of times and in much less formidable circumstances. Always up for a challenge, I did it anyway. A major conversion like this starts with envisioning what it will look like then trying something. That usually falls short of the vision for the piece but will give you something to react to and make improvements upon. That means the first attempt usually doesn't look very good; not ideal for showing the class.  Despite that it turned out as good as I hoped, something to improve upon but not quite there yet. Here's the end of the demo after converting the light:

I did some fine tuning after the demonstration but nothing radically changed. One thing I decided to play up is the warmth in the flesh tone as the form turned away from the cool moon's light. Here's the final version:

I hope you enjoyed this explanation of my painting. If so you can subscribe to my newsletters, follow the blog and share with anyone else you think would enjoy it too. Find the link below the blog post. I love feedback so let me know what you think of this or my website in general, tell me about yourself, ask questions or... whatever. Just click the “comment on this” tab at the top. 

Thanks!

Hans Guerin