One of my favorite blogs is
Gurney Journey . This blog is written by a very talented illustrator James Gurney, who created the Dinatopia Illustrations. Check it out!
James has been addressing the phenomenon of Subsurface Scattering and has had me thinking about it since last night.
When light enters transparent skin, such as fingertips or ear lobes on the far side, it bounces around the thinner layer of skin, eventually reemerging through the surface. If you were to hold your hand up against the light for example, the fingertips would show a brightness where the skin is the thinnest. When one translates this into a painting two things have to occur. The area that appears to be emanating light has to be more chromatic and the chromatic area has to be surrounded by denser non reflective skin painted in more mutes values. By playing either chromatic color against muted (grayed down) color or by having a much lighter value against a much darker one, the appearance of that glow can be recreated.
Now if we were to extend this phenomenon to babies or children of very fair complexion the surface layer of skin has to be somewhat translucent.
How do you achieve that glow, without turning pasty, when you are dealing with such light values, with .5 value shifts, where playing one shade against the other becomes much more difficult?
Threaded Mode
