Studio Lighting Tour - After You Paint (25 of 27)

Let's take a quick tour of my studio and I'll show you how I did my lighting. My studio display area uses the same bulbs as my painting work area, as I said, so the colors all look very much the same as they did when I painted them. As I mentioned, I use both ambient lights, recessed lights spread throughout the room, and I have accent lighting for my gallery artwork, and task lighting to illuminate my workspace. It's actually the same lights, just used differently. So let's walk through my studio, beginning on the gallery side. I do my best to get the lighting fairly even. It's tricky when you have both oil and watercolors because they seem to like different blacks. Now this is my drafting table. It's illuminated by the recessed lights, but I also have a single track light shining on it from the upper left side. I'm right-handed, so this prevents a shadow when I work. To the left you can see a work table. It's for miscellaneous tasks. I make sure it has light, but I don't fuss over it. I tend to move things around periodically as well, so that lighting changes. Now over to the left some more, you can see my primary work area, where I paint. This table is my watercolor work area, and I make sure that the lighting is even without overdoing the brightness on the surface. Remember lux? If it's too bright, it can throw off my judgment of the values. If I pan upward, you can see I have two lights aimed at the table, a few feet apart and slightly in front of where my head is. So basically I don't get much shadowing when I work. Now I do move this table as well, but I try to maintain the same kind of lighting. Over here I have my easels, a wall easel and a standalone easel. I try to get the same kind of lighting here as well, even and not too strong. But this surface is slanted, and it sits higher up, so for this setting I like two lights from above and behind me, one from the side. It may look a little confusing to you, so let me show you a different angle. The further back the light is, the wider the beam and the dimmer the lux. Sometimes you have to play with positioning. You can check the evenness by taking a photograph of a white surface on your easel with your phone. That always shows me where I may have some shadows. In addition to the painting surfaces, make sure you have light on your mixing area. You need to be able to judge your colors, and it should match your surface lighting. And really this goes for any paint medium. My track lights use MR-16 filtered 50 watt full spectrum halogen bulbs at 3500k and with a CRI of over 98. Plus they're situated at a 30 to 40 degree angle. The bulbs are put out by a company called Solux. It's a brand that is apparently used by well-known galleries around the world, but due to changes in technology and phasing out of certain forms of light, this company went out of business. It's a shame because I love them. They were a little pricey, but color accuracy was really important to me. And I can report that I've had them up for over 10 years now without having to change a bulb yet. That's amazing. At some point I will change them out for LED bulbs that as closely match as possible. What's nice about this setup is that the paintings are painted and displayed under the same lighting, as I've said, meaning viewers see the work just like I painted it. The negative, which is unavoidable no matter where you're set up, is that I do run into issues occasionally when exhibiting where the lighting is very different. It's amazing how colors can appear off. I literally won't show my paintings where the lighting is poor, as it negatively impacts how my work is viewed. But that's my decision. Now, when you're hanging your work for a long period of time, one thing you'll have to think about is cleaning your art, which is what we'll discuss in the next lecture.