HELP for Assignment 2: Adding shadow to the 1-pt Street.

Here is one of the examples I showed last week, but now with tone added in Photoshop. I think you'll agree the overall effect is strong. I think the student, Linh Vu, generally did an outstanding job following his light scheme and particularly in varying the value of the shadow areas to make the scene more real. I think I gave him at least an A- on this phase of it.

So which light scheme is this example? If you look at the way the shadows fall or even the overlay of colored lines, you'll soon figure out whether the sun is in front or behind.

There are some errors. Notice that the cast shadow of the awning at the lower left gets wider and wider. In the language of the class, the Law of Parallels never comes into effect as it should. This might be partly because Mr. Vu put the sun pretty close to the VP horizontally. That makes the cast shadows tend to run very long on the receding faces of the building.

For this and other reasons, I recommend to YOU making the sun (or moon) farther to one side of the VP--more to the right in this example. Don't have the sun so nearly above the VP, in other words.

I want to use this nice drawing to show you a couple helpful ideas. One is the "Elevation of Sunlight." So far we've only used d-lines on horizontal surfaces. But the fact is, light doesn't care which way is up. So if we want to use d-lines on vertical surfaces to simplify our work, it's just a matter of correctly picking the point that these special d-lines originate from. That point is the Elevation of Sunlight, which we find directly above the VP, at the height of the sun.

Using it, we can do a lot less of that move where the d-line runs into a wall and goes straight up or down; instead we just keep our attention on the wall. (Remember that d stands for "direction of light." A-lines stand for "angle of light" and always exist in 3D space, not on surfaces.)

Good luck, you guys. I know this is tough.

JH