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I learned this by accident as a teenager, while painting a warm yellow scene. :) I kept trying to paint the cold blue shadows I saw and it didn't look right. Inadvertently, I got that blue mixed into my orange on the messy palette. I didn't realise I'd made grey until a smudge ended up on the canvas. And my mind was blown. It looked PERFECT. I suddenly realised I didn't want blue at all for those cold shadows, I wanted a cold yellow-grey, and ~20 years later it's still one of my favourite landscape paintings I've done. Thank you for this excellent video!

the Dobby photos was a jumpscare😭

Mind blowing 😀

I'd like to come at this from a slightly different angle and offer the idea that too modern filmmakers are painfully embarrassed by the notion that films can and should often simply be fun. Between the scripts, plots, acting, music [oh... GOD, the music these days...] and lighting, the people who produce films - and thus the films themselves - are so obsessed with making them "real," "elevating the material" and "subverting the genre," that they have - in the process - fundamentally forgotten how to make them entertaining. You said it yourself at the end of the video, referencing Mary Poppins Then & Now - "It feels so much more BELIEVABLE." It's MARY FREAKIN' POPPINS - I don't WANT it to feel "BELIEVABLE." I want to be transported; I want to cry, scream, rejoice, stand up and cheer. And Hollywood wonders why it continues to collapse before our very eyes -

What color is the shadow? The color that gets approved in dailies.

As a guy who has drawn almost exclusively in pen & ink since he was a kid, and whose favorite artists [excluding Jack Kirby!] overwhelmingly work with muted, desaturated color palettes, I can't thank you enough for the lessons packed into this video. Once you get it - you've got it, like a light going off. [Of course, you still have to decide if it's a warm or a cool light!]

2:40

Watched this at work, your explanations are very clear, so are your examples, and it put me SO MUCH in the mood for art, I just want to drop everything and start painting, I knew some parts of it in theory but having you explaining this so clearly in your video helps me have a better mental structure of lighting. Thank you for your video <3 I'll come back to watch it again if I ever feel lost or demotivated in art

this is SO helpful. thank you!!

First time viewer. Can you create this exercise for us to do? To match colors just like you did? I have never drawn digitally but in high school in the 70’s, i did do an actual color match of a paint chip. Was a fun task. I liken this to that experience. I don’t even know what app you are drawing on. Loved thus lesson! My desire is to eventually paint in watercolor with ink.

I LOVE the idea of merging color and music theory together, I've been interested in this kinda concept for a couple years now. While I do object heavily to your methodology here, that color wheel music visualizer is a sick idea and I wanna try coding a proper one! On another note, my dive into really understanding color science has left me feeling like color is a damn MESS and probably not truly analogous to music

According to Nathan Fowkes in his color and light class, if you have a colored light source the highlights on an object will be the color of the light source and then as the light drops off, it mixes with the local color of the object. So, with a white light source, the colors would obviously increase in saturation as the light drops off if the object isn’t white or gray. But if the light source is colored, such as red, and the object is gray, the color would drop in saturation was it approached the terminator. It appears warmer on your face when you use the yellow light source because of subsurface scattering of the skin and the warmth of blood under the skin.

You might like this music video I made mixing colors with sound: czcams.com/video/FvvreF1xzH8/video.html

I have been painting for many years and have had many workshop and class teachers. Your approach to creating images using light (as opposed to form) as the primary principle is extremely useful and unique in my experience. I have always taught my own students that painting is first and foremost about seeing, and that you need to paint what you see, not what you think. After a certain point you will have learned enough to make aesthetic decisions that deviate from that rule, but only when you have understood why you are doing it. Your videos are pure gold.

the moment around 1:28 where you step forward and how it lined up roughly with the end of the previous segment in the most awesome way, that was magic, movie magic!

This test should be done with a single colored ball instead of your face, and also measuring the light linearly without the cameras tonemapping, colorspace etc because all of this will do stuff with the light that skews your test. Light near or above clipping will saturate and shift color if done badly, or if you instead use AGX or ACES it will desaturate, but in real life it doesn't do neither of those. And using your face as a reference is also bad because of the subsurface scattering in you skin where it tends to be more visible going more redish in the terminator.

Very helpful, I like the evidence presented to help see the reality. One other thing I noticed that has a big impact on the "shadow" colour, is the colour of the object itself. For instance, a reddish coloured cliff will of course look red on the sunny areas, but there will also be red in the shadow areas, although it may be a bit bluer red or perhaps warmer depending on the reflected light.

The warm light-cold shadows is just a Hollywood color gimmick to create a look.

Thanks , you are working on photoshop , i wish you to work on canvas to mix color naturally by yourself , not by readymade computer generated color. its hard to match the color manually on palette .

Sooooo helpful! I have a Studio art degree since 1974 and nobody ever explained shadows to me like this!

Pure gold this here video :D

Hi Jeremy, thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience. How do we determine the real color of an object, since its color varies depending on the light source. For instance, the color of a red rose under the bright sun is different than its color inside a room. Which one is the real color of the rose? Is there a scientific method to measure that? Thanks, Fara

After listening to the whole video, my brain could only process the light at the end while he was talking wahahaha. Anyway, this was so enlightening. I don't remember my thought process or how I perceived my art before. Vaguely, I think I unconsciously assumed that the colors must be in harmony for the whole image to work. I realized while watching that I must be referring to the light actually, I was just lacking that knowledge. I came from the video Powers in the Gray. And now I'm even more excited to practice applying these new things I learned. Thank you so much!!

Wauw! Thank you!

I am just lucky to have run into your channel. You are one of the few best ones who enlighten me in light subject. And I highly appreciate your giving back what you have learned in those so many years of experience in the field , back into those who need your experience and valuable information into the world , I just simply say " Thank You ",, You touch onto lives somewhere on this earth planet,

I've watched this video a few times by now to motivate myself to get to this point. I decided to start giving these a try finally, and was painting with you (though it was something else). It was relaxing to just be painting alongside someone else for 15 minutes! I, too, prefer these to longer studies; they're like sketches. I will probably stick to a mix of both but these short ones are great for forcing encounters with new objects.

Well in the cinema shadows are always blue!

Your the best at explaning

A good way to visualise the color of the secondary light sources would be a white ball (styrofoam for example) Also, skin and other 'soft' materials have light travelling through them, which can reach all the way to the shadow side without having secondary light sources. A glass of skimmed milk, a milk glass bulb and a human ear let light through and can actually tint it

Omg bounce light! I have never done that before! It’s gonna level up my paintings!!!!

Absolutely amazing teaching. This finally made it click. Thank you soooooo much!

Very interesting video. Excellent!

excellent! passing it on for sure

I'm so glad I just watched your videos on color instead of spending $40K on art school

Hi! I am having trouble doing a color study like this with water color paints. The rules for that medium seem different -or the workflow rather- but I am not sure how. Do you work with water colors as well?

I’m a vfx artist and we simulate using various techniques such as HDRI environment spheres. Bounce light , indirect light from objects . The technique is called Global illumination

Nice video! But I have a question. You mentioned examples where secondary lighting affects shadow colors, particularly during the day. This shows that the absence of the main light isn't the only factor determining the color of shadows or penumbras. However, it seems different at night. For instance, under the warm glow of a streetlight, shadows often appear blueish. Are there other factors influencing shadow color in such situations?

Great great great

I keep thinking "Josef Albers" while watching this. Excellent video.

Dude, movies 🎬 must be adjusted to a colour theory. You must decide what that is. You can't just play the movie and photograph it and talk about what you see. No. You must spend hours adjusting all the colours. You CAN change everything on screen. You can take out all the colours. You can darken the whole image. You're not a victim in all this. The flip side of your in control of all the colours is; you're not able to communicate with the public. They never tuned the movie colours. They don't know there's a thousand different versions of the movie on 1 disc. It takes 5 hours to warm up the DVD player then you must decide what colours you're going to tune the movie to. Then it takes hours to tune in those colours. After 8 hours, you then can sit down to watch the movie. Only you saw that version of the famous movie.

Excellent and so helpful! Thanks for this content and I hope you keep developing!

Watching it feels like im finding the missing puzzle piece

How does the hue shift from light to shadow? The yellow light turns clockwise while the blue light turns counter-clockwise. What if the light is green or purple?

Amazing! I would like to use those color combinations in my painting!

Fantastic explanation! Thank you so much for all that you do!

I love your videos Jeremy! You say in this one that there’s a Pinterest link? I can’t seem to find it?

The left gaizer looks like an angel coming up from it with the hugh wings faced away... 😊

Do you adjust any settings on the turpentine brush?

That was amazing

in painting it's well known that using complementary color for the shadow is helping. I don't know if it's based on reality or it is leveraging an optical illusion