12 lighting setups rendered on four primitives — sphere, cylinder, cube and head form — so you can see what light does before you guess.

Everything you will ever render is a combination of a sphere, a cylinder, a box and an egg. A head is an egg with boxes on it. An arm is a tapered cylinder. Learn what light does to those four shapes and you can light anything, because you stop copying photographs and start reasoning about form.

A painter's lighting model, not a photographic one

Every plate uses a key light, a sky fill from above, a warm bounce from below, and a terminator that runs warm where the light dies. That is how the light is actually taught, and it is why these read like paintings rather than renders.

Twelve setups: three-quarter key both ways, top, under, side, rim, flat front, Rembrandt, overcast, golden hour, moonlight, and key-plus-cool-rim.

The mistake that flattens everything

Making reflected light too bright. The moment bounce in the shadow gets close to the value of the lit side, the form stops reading as solid. The plates show you exactly how dark it should stay.

What's included

• 12 lighting plates, each showing all four primitives
• 48 individual forms on transparency, to drop beside your work
• 3 eleven-step value scales: neutral, warm and cool
• Guide: the parts of a lit form, all twelve setups, how to use the plates

Formats

• PNG (lighting plates)
• PNG (transparent cut-outs)

Works with

• Any image viewer
• Procreate
• Photoshop
• Clip Studio Paint
• Krita

Download: ZIP · 3.7 MB · 67 PNG plates and cut-outs