Stepping in and Painting Cave Interiors!

Painting cave interiors and its environment is an exercise of knowing light and shadows. Unlike outside environments, where there is a global light source, you are confined into a space where light can bounce of many different objects.

The challenge of this lesson is to play around with values, light, shadows, and ambiance. Depending on how you look at it, transitioning between similar values can be more difficult.

That is, instead of working with many different color hues, you are generally confined to one hue. How will you expand on that one hue?

1. The values

As usual, we want to create an abstract outline of what we want our interior to look like. I have opted to use a simple circular opening. Using my chalk brush, I painted in a circular fashion to get an idea of what the interior should be.

For the majority of this step, try to stick with one type of color. Initially, I am using a dark and flat blue color. As I paint, I switched to pure black. My digital pen pressure sensitivity and my opacity settings are what keeps me from coloring it completely black.

In order to get the range of colors within one value, I always have the eyedropper ready. You should be doing that too! With one hand on the keyboard, always use a key for the eyedropper tool. This will help you with sampling the colors around that hue.

We are not worried about technical details just yet. The main purpose of this step is to practice sampling surrounding colors in your painting. Of course, higher contrasts create the illusion of depth.

2. Creating shapes

Once you have a general layout of what your interior will be, the next step in painting cave interiors is to deal with shapes. With your brush, select a smaller diameter setting. From there, you will start defining your interior with various different shapes. Depending on your comfort level, you can do these on a different layer or on the same layer.

Start off with a darken color and begin creating random patterns on your painting. Think about elevation of the cave walls and on the ground. What patterns will you create? How will the shapes twist and turn inside the interior?

Once the darkened shapes are done, switch to a lighter color and being painting where you think the light will hit. It is these light outlines that will really bring your shapes and objects the realism it needs.

It is your pressure sensitivity that gives off the various different values of light. Therefore, push harder on your pen when you are working near the area where light is the strongest.

Remember to have your other hand ready on the eyedropper tool in case you need to sample different colors!

3. Stalactites, stalagmites, and other features

Again, build the shapes that you need with a larger sized brush and outline where you think the light will hit. Stalactites hang from the ceiling. Hence, you need to make them fairly sharp due to how gravity behaves.

Stalagmites are built from the ground up and are less sharp. It has horizontal type rock surfaces and blunt edges. One general rule of thumb I like to use is that where there are stalactites, there will be stalagmites. Use this as a planning guide to create depth since it is almost a mirror reflection.

Think about elevation, light, shadows, etc.

This is also the step to think about other types of stuff that can be in a cave like dripping water, gas clouds, waterfalls, ancient architecture, and other rock formations...should you feel challenged to paint these items.

4. Finishing touches

As you are close to finishing up painting cave interiors to your liking, the next step consists of refining your environment to emphasize the ambiance present. There are many ways of doing so. Personally, I like to create contrast to really highlight depth.

You can use any sharpening tools to make the rock formations stand out even more or use slight color variations to show different lighting sources. The choices are open ended and depend on what you feel comfortable doing. This is why it is so important to have a good artistic foundation!

Other tools that you can use are the dodge and burn tools. Use it if you need to work on just small areas, that require slight shadow and light alterations, without having to repaint the entire surface or texture.

Remember to keep practicing and building up that strong art foundation with everything you paint!

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