daydreamer's footnotes

In my self-taught artistic career, I always love life drawings. I find to be able to convey the felt experience onto a canvas is one of the ultimate goals in a successful drawing. With my own personal artworks, I tended to create lighting scene exactly as how it was felt. Especially when creating landscape scene with deep cultural heritage, lighting shouldn’t force its way to become the protagonist of the story. The landscape should always be the focal point, and lighting is there to guide the viewers into their stories, through the contrast of light and shadows, shades and reflections. To me, it is my way to pay respect to the landscape, the history and its heritage.

For this reason, I strive for photorealism in my 3D artwork, because, for one thing, software these days are so well developed they can calculate fairly accurately how light behave through different mediums when parameters for given objects are set, giving each a physical property. When I looked into the mathematics behind, say the amount of sunlight bouncing into a room through the reflection and refraction of the windows, a giant scary looking monster of matrices calculation can easily fill a few pages of paper, just to work out the calculation, and that’s only the calculation for one dot on the drawing. Not to mention the amount of time it will take an average human brain to process such calculation with margin of error – very high. The ability of software to do those kind of calculations on a wimp and then able to translate the calculation into colour pixels through the giant calculator we called render engine, opened up a lot of possibilities to dreamers to create and relive the experience they felt in CG drawings. That is not to say we can swiftly ignore learning the math. Understand the basis of the math is still important to a technical artist, for troubleshooting, and perhaps, leading to new discovery.

Life drawing artists make a lot of detail observations that can be explained in science and math. We don’t always first think about the mathematical formula when making observation to various natural phenomena, nor do we think about the physics behind how each phenomenon works. We simply document the observations with our tools, in pencils and in colours,

Then we put on our technical CG artist hat. Once we made the observations, we dig deeper into the science and the math, in computer softwares to make sense of our observations. That is what I meant by lighting as felt experience. The goal was to document our most honest felt experience when trying to recreate a landscape that we may or may not have been there, or have been there but not at the right moment of time. To be able to draw similar experience from elsewhere and merge it onto a scenery we yearned for and wished we were there at the right time.

Above image is my last drawing in 2025. Can be viewed here:
https://portfolio.lilioart.com/travel-cg-photography-schwangau-germany