Painting Light and Shadow: The Basics for Portraits and Characters
Gabrielle Brickey · Portrait Artist - ArtworkbyGabrielle.com
Learn to see and reproduce real lighting patterns on faces, not guess at shading
What you will learn
- Read the planes of the head to structure a portrait in three dimensions before adding light
- Identify highlight, halftone, core shadow, cast shadow and occlusion shadow on any round form
- Mix and adjust local skin tone by value, hue and saturation across the zones of the face
- Recognise and paint distinct light scenarios: direct sun, overcast, window, and warm/neutral/cool electric bulbs
- Name and reproduce classic portrait lighting angles such as Rembrandt, loop, split and rim lighting
Standout ideas
- The upward-facing planes of a backlit face pick up cool sky colour while the downward-facing planes pick up warm ground colour, a rule that holds from forehead to chest
- Occlusion shadows, the tight dark gap where two forms meet, read well painted warm brown-orange rather than flat black
- Broken colour, scattering small shifts of hue like cool pinks and purples at the same value across skin, adds life without changing the value structure
Best for: Intermediate portrait or character artists who can already draw a face and want to understand and control how light and shadow behave on it.
The course delivers a genuinely detailed, observation-based framework for lighting portraits, covering plane structure, skin tone mixing, light source behaviour and named lighting angles with specific, repeatable shadow shapes for each. It is explicitly non-technical about the physics of light and leans on the instructor's own artistic conventions rather than photographic theory, which suits practical painting but means viewers wanting a scientific grounding should look elsewhere. At under two hours it is dense with content but still functions more as a reference primer than a from-scratch beginner course.