Paint the figure under the environment's lighting

You can invent a lit figure that belongs in its environment, with your drawing, lighting, and integration all holding up at once.

What it is

This capstone combines inventing a solid, proportionally accurate human figure, posing it in perspective, and matching the environment's overall light and color.

You're applying form lighting, cast shadows, local value versus illumination, color temperature, and material rendering on skin, cloth, and props so the figure reacts to the same light as the background.

It also leans on scale and atmosphere: distance haze, bounce light from nearby objects, and effects like fog, fire, screens, or magic should hit the figure the same way they hit the rest of the scene.

You can check it when

• ✓You can drop a figure into an existing background and, after adjusting light and color, it's hard to tell it wasn't painted there from the start.
• ✓In your own scenes from imagination, the figure's light direction, shadow softness, contrast, and color match the environment, so nothing feels pasted on.

Related skills

• Constructing figures from imagination
• Posing figures from imagination
• Figures — single and multiple at different depths
• An object's own lightness vs. the light falling on it (a white shirt in shadow is still white)
• Cast shadows (direction, softness)
• Temperature (warm/cool relationships; temperature shifts across form)
• Organics (skin, bone, horn, flesh)
• Atmospheric effects (scattering, volumetric light, caustics through water and glass)