“Stained Glass” by Neill-Ayane

Hello ladies and germs, today’s piece methinks, will serve as a great example of layers and lighting effects in digital art. The piece for today depicting a white-haired character standing in front of stained glass and pear branches, was done by the artist Neill-Ayane. She is another artist whom I have become friends with and will be posting the works of on a semi-regular basis among lots of other incredible works.

Jumping in, I thought that because this piece is technically less complicated than some of the others we’ve reviewed that we would use this as an opportunity to talk about lighting. Speaking with Neill, she mentioned that she loves working with nighttime lighting where the light source comes from the back, versus other angles that one might get with the sun, and sort of playing around with different light styles. There are a number of ways that this piece engages with light. For one you have the beautiful god rays reflecting and bouncing off our character’s hair that gives it a real radiant luminescence to it. The hair color being white is actually a very intentional choice, because as we all know white tends to show a wider array of other colors reflected off of it. This works extremely well together with the stained glass which shows up as hues of red and blue that we can see around various areas of the picture. Lastly, we have the actual back light source that is providing us with the instructions for where the light will show up on the character and on different parts of the painting.

Another thing that’s a real nice touch is allowing us to see in the same place, how the light interacts with darker objects. If we look towards the top of the composition we can see light hitting various parts of the pear branches. From one angle you get an almost white color from the light saturation while on another leaf, you might get a more blueish-green hue from the lighting hitting those areas much less. This really provides a good example of how perspective or angle and different lighting effects interact because you can really see how different situations look side by side in this picture.

The last thing that I wanted to touch on here, involves one mainstay of Neill-Ayane’s style that stands out to me. Though she is a fantastic lineartist and quite diverse in her ability to draw in different styles, check out the links under the caption if you don’t believe me, I wanna talk about framing and silhouettes for a second. Neill in so many of her pieces is excellent at creating characters in different dynamic figure poses where the silhouette of the character is interesting by itself, without any fancy effects and really tells its own story. If you simply look at the shape of this character’s hair or the space that her jacket takes up you can quickly start to see what I mean. Not only is there movement and emotion conveyed simply yet effectively here, the elements are placed strategically to juxtapose the various layer effects this piece has. You have the silhouette and character or figure layer, the background layer, and a lighting layer at minimum in this piece that each compliment each other and work together to create a product greater than the sum of its parts. The placement of elements allows for the effortless inclusion of effective contrast, various hues and colors of shapes cast by the light coming through the stained glass, and different environmental aspects that set a mood and give the picture a more epic and significant feel. Neill really has a handle on drawing you into her universe and immersing you in whatever character or dramatic scene she decides to give the world.