With so much focus on the technical side of of visualization, we want to bring some much needed attention back to the roots of our industry. Every Friday we'll be posting a series of paintings, photographs and traditional illustrations to showcase lighting, composition and mood to help inspire your digital visualizations. Below you'll find a selection of works in the public domain. Do you have a favourite non-digital artist you think we should feature? Let us know!
 

Creative Lighting 

The following Creative Lighting Breakdown was sent to us by Nikos Nikolopoulos founder at Creatlive Lighting. For several years, Nikos worked at Cityscape Digital as their lead 3d artist and then following on as CGI director. Eventually the call of the homeland grew too strong, but Nikos and Cityscape were like family too and did not want to part company. Instead they forged a new concept together, creativelighting.co, a vision for CG driven by the philosophies of cinematic lighting. Below Nikos speak briefly about a few of his favourite pieces from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.




Chasing Beauty - Image 1



There are many ways you can use the light creatively to tell a story and your inspiration should come from everywhere. Today I would like to focus into paintings and study the masters of light and dark like Rembrandt and Caravaggio. There is so much to learn when you analyse paintings about lighting, composition, colour, tone and message. Always make time when you travel to visit a museum, art gallery or photography exhibition. Study your masters live is a unique experience and I believe that real world inspiration is so much better that technical knowledge.

I’m very inspired from Caravaggio and the great use of light on his paintings. If you study The Calling of Saint Matthew you will see how the artist's use of light and shadow adds drama to the painting as well as giving the figures a quality of immediacy. The lighting is directional, very sharp with hard shadows. That helps the figures to stand out and the strong directionality of the light guides the eye and unifies the composition. Everything important is hit by sunlight and the rest falls into shadow and doesn’t distract the eye.

 

Title: The Calling of Saint Mathew
Artist: Caravaggio
Year: 1599–1600
Medium: Oil on canvas

 

The first time I visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam I spent a lot of time studying The Night Watch, one of the most famous paintings of Rembrandt and probably the most famous painting in the Netherlands. I think the idea is not to go around the museum and see as many paintings as possible, you should know your masters and spend some time seeing their best work and try to understand their techniques and art.

It is a group portrait like the painting on the right from Frans Hals (See Chasing Beauty image 2 below). Both paintings have great composition but I realized that I care less about the second painting since the light is even on the faces and there is equal attention to all faces compared to Rembrandt who decided to have a narrative and hierarchy on the lighting, which is the key ingredient to Imagemaking and storytelling. There is a great movement and attention to detail. The more time you spend with the painting the more things you see and understand. Rembrandt wanted us to look first on the two men on the foreground and clearly they are the most important figures. Check out the captain’s hand casting shadow from the sunlight on the beautiful uniform.

I do recommend you to visit the Rijksmuseum on your next trip to Amsterdam.



Title: The Night Watch
Artist: Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn
Year: 1642
Medium: Oil on canvas



Chasing Beauty - Image 2 (Left: The Night Watch/Rembrandt, Top Right: DeFrans Hals/magere compagnie)

Title: De magere compagnie
Artist: Frans Hals
Year: 1633-1637 
Medium: Oil on canvas

 

Hudson River School

Thank you to Claudio Nunez at Architecte OAQ for suggesting that we feature some of the works from the Hudson River School.  

"The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. The paintings for which the movement is named depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and the White Mountains; eventually works by the second generation of artists associated with the school expanded to include other locales in New England, the Maritimes, the American West, and South America." - Hudson River School Wikipedia




Title: Rocky Mountain Landscape
Artist: Albert Bierstadt
Year: 1870 
Medium: Oil on canvas

Title: Among the Sierra Nevada, California
Artist: Albert Bierstadt 
Year: 1868 
Medium: Oil on canvas


 

Title: The Parthenon 
Artist: Frederic Edwin Church
Year: 1871
Medium: Oil on canvas 




Title: El Khasne Petra 
Artist: Frederic Edwin Church 
Year: 1874 
Medium: Oil on canvas



Title: Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives
Artist: Frederic Edwin Church
Year: 1870 
Medium: Oil on canvas 



Title: The Course of Empire: Consummation
Artist: Thomas Cole 
Year: 1835-1836 
Medium: Oil on canvas 




Title: Home in the Woods
Artist: Thomas Cole 
Year: 1847 
Medium: Oil on canvas