In the first lesson of his workshop, Jeremy Vickery sets the stage for a practical exploration of light and color that leverages viewers' existing intuition. The workshop is intended to help artists create more believable and appealing visual work, whether in painting, drawing, or 3D scenes.

Duration: 1m 27s

This lesson establishes the principles of light behavior. By understanding how light travels, interacts with surfaces, reflects, absorbs, and refracts, artists can create more realistic and believable imagery. Observing real-world light behavior is key to successfully replicating it in artistic work.

Duration: 4m 35s

This lesson emphasizes that understanding bounced light is fundamental to creating realistic lighting. Without considering how light bounces off surfaces, rendered scenes and artwork will appear flat and unrealistic. By understanding the difference between specular and diffuse reflections, artists can recreate the light that gives scenes depth, reveals form, and creates the rich environments we see in reality.

Duration: 11m 53s

This lesson emphasizes how understanding shadows helps to create realistic and convincing artwork. Shadows give objects their sense of form, weight, and spatial relationship within their environment. By observing how shadows behave in the real world, artists can make their work more believable and visually compelling.

Duration: 15m 38s

This lesson shifts how artists should think about color in digital painting, moving from a simplistic approach to understanding how light temperature, saturation, and color work together. By following the principles of color temperature and understanding that darker values become more saturated, artists can create paintings with much more depth, vibrancy, and realism.

Duration: 21m 44s

This lesson explores why understanding how surfaces respond to light is crucial for creating believable 3D renders and paintings. The key is recognizing that different materials interact with light in unique and complex ways beyond simple reflection. By observing real-world examples and understanding subsurface scattering and Fresnel effects, artists can add subtle but important details that make the difference between plastic-looking surfaces and convincing, lifelike materials.

Duration: 21m 28s

This lesson explores how manipulating contrast, atmospheric haze, and camera-like effects such as bloom and depth of field enables artists to control the viewer's perception of scale and distance, and the focal points of an image. These principles provide powerful compositional tools for establishing mood and spatial relationships in any visual medium.

Duration: 18m 16s

This lesson jumps into an art study, demonstrating that master artists understood and applied lighting principles long before modern technical terminology existed. By analyzing bounced light, atmospheric depth, color temperature, and shadow placement in traditional paintings, contemporary artists can learn how proper lighting techniques create dimensionality, guide the viewer’s attention, and elevate artwork to new levels.

Duration: 12m 42s

The final lesson of the workshop demonstrates that effective digital painting relies on applying fundamental lighting principles rather than technical skill alone. By making use of color temperature, atmospheric perspective, occlusion, and environmental lighting effects, artists can create convincing scenes across various subjects and moods.

Duration: 10m 31s