Fri Sep 22, 2017 8:12 am by Taron
You are speaking from my heart, Knacki! I used to say all these things almost literally so. The ideal, I believe, lies somewhere in between. While you can imagine a great deal of aspects and details, there are layers of observation you somehow have to learn before you allow them to become part of your imagination. The challenge is to keep all things where they belong. Once you start painting from a direct reference, it's its very own mode. Your brain lights up in a very different place than where it would, if you were to imagine things. And all that you learn, somehow wants to stay associated to this kind of mental activity. To train your understanding for purely imaginary painting by training with references, you must stay very strong to make the extra effort to translate what you see into understanding first. Imagine the whole form, visualize the nature of it, become the light in your head that touches the forms, illuminates the inside of where it can enter, spill around, bounce around... so you have to imagine reason for all that you see. Because if you do not, you actually hurt yourself by binding new associations to very different processes in your mind.
Now, Knacki, you're doing a mighty fine job already, really. It's creepy as heck, that mildly seasoned vampire lady, but she's very luminous. However, you tend to lose yourself in the individual portions, when you do lighting. It's as if you were shading from shape to shape, rather than considering the whole first and then pushing things into the light and pulling others away from it. It's hard to explain and even harder to master, but you need to develop a feeling for how to control the ins and outs of a large shape, rather than mastering the ins and outs by themselves.
So... take a ball and turn it into a pumpkin! First you shade the ball, then you carefully push and pull what will become the pumpkin. A hard single light is a good start, of course, but then you can use softer and softer lighting in subsequent experiments, see what it takes and what it doesn't take to make this happen.
To me, one of the absolute masters of tangible lighting, something you can understand when you're looking at it, but it will inspire you to gain control over it yourself, is Carlos Huante! Check out his drawings and paintings... he has learned from the masters and translated it into pure understanding.