Direction and falloff
Where light comes from and how it weakens with distance — so your shading, shadows, and contrasts agree on one source.
What it is
Direction is where the light comes from and where it's traveling to. Every form shadow, cast shadow, and highlight in your painting should line up with one imaginary arrow running from the source to the object and on to whatever it hits.
Choose a direction and keep it consistent. Planes facing the light get more illumination; planes turned away get less. Cast shadows fall on the far side from the source, never at random. If the light is high and to the left, everything agrees — noses, tree trunks, buildings, and folds of cloth all cast shadows down and to the right.
Falloff is how light loses strength as it travels. The farther a surface sits from the source, or the more air and objects the light passes through, the dimmer and lower-contrast it gets. Show this by reducing brightness and contrast with distance, and by letting highlights weaken as forms move out of the main beam.
Why it matters
Without clear direction, your scene looks lit by several suns at once — shadows point different ways, and the viewer stops believing the space. Without falloff, everything looks as flatly lit as a flash photo, with no sense of depth or focus. Together, they give your painting one believable light that explains all the shading and guides the eye through near, mid, and far.
You can check it when
- ✓You can point to any object in your painting, state the light's direction on it (say, above and slightly in front), and its cast shadow matches that choice.
- ✓Your highlights and brightest contrasts cluster where the light first hits, then weaken as surfaces turn away or sit farther from the source — instead of staying equally strong everywhere.
- ✓Your wider scenes show objects farther from the light, or deeper in space, growing dimmer and lower-contrast than closer ones — consistently across the image.
- ✓When you draw arrows over a piece to show light travel, they form one coherent pattern from the source through the scene — not a different guess for every object.
Related skills
- Atmospheric value compression
- Rim light and backlighting; top lighting; underlighting
- The shadow family (core, form, cast, contact/occlusion)
- Atmospheric effects (scattering, volumetric light, caustics through water and glass)
- Light types (sun/directional, area, point, spot, HDRI/environment)
- Depth staging (foreground / middle ground / background)