For a change of pace from the Dennis and Brain adventures of the essay series, I thought I'd play around for a bit in trying to make a simple effect happen: creating a ball of light that seems to glow on its own.
This is obviously extremely rudimentary and more of a starting point for exploring how light works and doesn't work in a drawing, but I at least got a crude idea of what needs to happen in order for light to be more believable than not.
Mainly, the first two tries were in making a sort of field of light or a glowing patch of air around the light in order to give the impression that it was radiating the contrast of its light against the dark background clearly. But this generally didn't so much make the room look like there was a bright spot in it as it made the air look foggy.
Next I tried adding a table surface underneath, with a well-defined edge, to give the illusion of a reflective surface just under the ball. This worked a little better, but it didn't look very realistic.
Finally I decided to give up on clouding the air around the ball in general, since light is only visible when it's reflected after all, and put a few basic boxes in the space to catch the light in a semi-ordinary way. This felt a bit closer, but I liked the gradient feel of the cloudy approach still.
So I did what I've been doing so far to create a sense of shadows in an otherwise bright-ish image; I put a black overlay layer on top, and erased away where the highlights and mid tones were supposed to be until they came through.
My preference would be to give the shapes better edges, and maybe a sense of texture, but that'll have to wait, as I found I was already out of time for now.
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