Snowy light

A nice seasonal picture. (As always, this is a colour study, not a good picture)

10am, Feb 5, looking North towards Glasgow

Sunset light

I like the hills.

10:45pm, June 4, looking North towards Glasgow

 
Idiot that I am, I accidentally saved this over another one which I hadn't posted yet :-(

Autumn sun light

9.50am, Nov 5, looking North towards Glasgow

Frost on some roofs!

It's fascinating - the second roof from the front looks reddish brown here. In the previous one it looks bluish grey.

I hope our neighbour never decides to replace his garage roof (front roof) This one has lots of character!

Dreich autumn light

Decided to do another of these (as always, this is just meant to be a light study, not a good picture).
I've got another photo with beautiful autumn sunshine, but this one was quicker!

11.13am, Nov 15, looking North towards Glasgow

 I do like autumn colours.

Not very light study

This is actually from a couple of years ago, which is why the trees are shorter.

Quinaig & Loch Nedd, 10:10pm, 27th July, looking East

My picture is far patchier than the photo, but I just wanted to do it quickly.

I had a number of photos, all with different levels of darkness - I don't know how dark it really was.

It's interesting how much darker this is than the one taken 20 mins earlier (on a different day). The mist will be the reason.

Another light study

Haven't done one of these for a while.

Quinaig & Loch Nedd, 8:30pm, 20th July, looking East

I like the colours in this one.

Quinaig Light

A couple of light studies. I was getting sick of the high flats, so now we move a bit further north, with a couple of views of Quinaig (the mountain) and Loch Nedd.

Quinaig & Loch Nedd, 7:15pm, 26th July, looking East

Quinaig & Loch Nedd, 9:50pm, 15th July, looking East

This view is one of the reasons my family and I have gone back to the same place every summer for the last 17 years. Every time you look out the window it's different, as the colours on the mountain, loch and sky are constantly changing - so expect more pictures in the coming days...
 
As with the others, these are not meant to have any artistic merit as pretty pictures - it's just a study of the colours. I enjoy doing studies like this as a morning exercise, as all the info's there - I'm not tempted to go off and do research and never get the rest of my work done!

Aerial perspective

7:05 am. Somewhere between Glasgow and Preston. Dull & overcast.

Lots of interesting things here:

• Contrast between light and extremely dark.
• The foreground grass looks very green, but is actually far darker than the greens I usually use.
• Fairly flat colours.
• How grey so many colours are. But it doesn't really look dull.

It's odd - I did this on a different computer during the daytime. Some of the tree colours look much lighter, so I would have done it a bit different on this computer.

Not saying I should always do it this dark. But it obviously can be, and not look weird.

Olympic torch

Anticipation

I got a better photo of this wee boy than of the actual torch!

Dawn Light

No, I am not completely crazy. I just happened to wake up at that time, noticed it was dawn, took the photo, and went back to sleep.

4.30am, June 3, looking North towards Glasgow

Best visibility of them all, as far as distant hills are concerned.
Very little difference between red roofs and green trees.

Noon Light

I know it says 1pm, but that's because of British Summer Time. As far as the light is concerned, it's noon.

1pm, May 26, looking North towards Glasgow

This is the most colourful one so far. Even so, the greens are much subtler than I would have expected.

This one has the best visibility - there are layers of hills that weren't even in the others. And so much more background detail is visible in the photo.

On the other hand, everything is very flat looking - the foreground roofs in particular - as there's not many shadows, with the sun coming almost straight down.

Hope you're not getting too bored with these - not many left to do now: I have an early evening photo, and rain or mist would be interesting if I can get one. Dawn would also be nice - but I'm not that dedicated at this time of year!

Beach Light

We break into our normal schedule of pictures of roofs and high flats to celebrate a typical (?) Scottish summer day...

This was just meant to be a fairly rough colour study - though  a bit more detailed than the roofs -  but I got carried away, so it took a while.

Troon beach, 4.50pm, 27th May

It's fascinating the different colours in the shadows. The shadows that are on the tops of his arms are blue, because they reflect the sky. But there's also purply, yellowish and reddish ones. Not sure what the reasons for all of them are.

Night Light

Well, this was an easy one - so little detail!

Didn't get the position of the photo quite the same, as I had to brace it against the window frame so it didn't blur with so little light! 

I like  the pink lights; they go well with the sunset.

10:40pm, May 24, looking North towards Glasgow

It's interesting how different this one is from the one 40 minutes earlier (on a different day).

Overcast light

Almost the same time as the photo I took on Wednesday morning, but this one's from Monday, with different weather.

8.20am, May 23, looking North towards Glasgow

In some ways the colours are similar, but the chimneys are barely noticeable in this one, where they were so prominent in the sunny picture. The whites and creams are all grey and murky beige. There's very little contrast. 

Interestingly, though, the greens are almost the same.

More light studies

Did these yesterday and today - one photo from yesterday morning, the other from yesterday evening. 

I actually had to pochle the second photo a bit - unlike the human eye, the camera can't cope with bright sky and dark ground - if the sky looked right the ground was far too dark. But if the ground was right, the sky was too pale. So I took two photos, one pointing at the sky and one at the foreground, and then blended them. Even then, I think the foreground appeared lighter in reality.

8.25am, May 23, looking North towards Glasgow

 

9pm, May 23, looking North towards Glasgow

I thought it would be good to do the same scene with different lighting, a bit like Monet's haystacks (though maybe not quite as skillful - he didn't cheat with a computer!). 

It was very interesting to see what things were more or less important in the different pictures. For example, in the morning one the reds stand out a lot. Also, there is far more detail visible in the background - in the evening ones it all tends to blend together. In the morning one, the blocks of high flats look 3D because of the angle of the light. In the other two, they look flat.

In all the pictures I've done so far, the effect of aerial perspective has been very noticeable (that means that, as things get more distant, they become less distinct, and closer in colour to the sky).

Also, the colours are all more muted than I tend to use. But they don't really look dull.

If I were doing an illustration based on the morning one, I'd probably make the sky bluer. It was blue higher up.

Light study

The book I got about Light has exercises throughout it. The first of these is simply to look. To be aware of what light does. 

Part of this is to take lots of photos, at all times of the day, and with all kinds of light. You should do this with your camera set on the daylight setting, otherwise your camera will compensate for the different colours of light, and make them all look the same.

So I took a number of photos on Saturday, and have done a colour study of one of them. This is not meant to be a good picture - it's just the colours that matter.

10pm, May 19, looking North towards Glasgow

I used the eyedropper tool to select each colour. Some of them surprised me - that little bit of 'white' wall near the bottom is actually a dark greyish blue, far darker than the sky!

In an illustration, I would probably lighten everything a little, and maybe exaggerate the colours a bit. But to stylise something, you need to know what it's really like, first.

Light for Visual Artists

 I got a copy of this book for my birthday. I think it's going to be very useful.

I especially found the bits about colours of shadows interesting - I had no clue about that at all. Knowing why things appear the way they do will make it much easier. 

It will take a few readings to get my head round all the science, but I was encouraged when towards the end he said 'Art is not physics'!