The journey to painting a decent volumetric light
By: Martov Company
Tags: Lighting, Cinematography, Game Development, Inktober, Watercolor

by Martin Bradstreet

A confluence of events recently occurred that lead to my wanting to be able to paint volumetric lights better, the biggest of them being Inktober. If you’re not sure what volumetric light is, the simplest way to explain it is to show a couple shots that have a lot of it.

You can see the effect of the lighting on the air it passes through in a volumetric light, as opposed to just on the surfaces it touches. Shot from the Handmaid’s Tale, cinematography: Colin Watkinson.

And here’s one I took in my apartment with a cell phone. That’s Carlito, my taxidermied rooster colleague. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which is the superior shot.

In film, these effects are usually the result of a hazer or sometimes a fog machine, though my personal experience owning a fog machine is they are the messier option, and produce more of a true fog effect, largely because the particles are impossible to keep still, whereas with a hazer, they will hang in the air more stably for some reason unknown to me. I don’t think they’re used much in film anymore as it’s so hard to control the fog (bands use hazers these days so I must imagine film and television does too).

Film (and video games) use volumetric lighting for all kinds of reasons, the biggest of course being it looks awesome. I’m not sure you will hear cinematographers saying that’s why its used though (to support the story!) but honestly, it is such a stylized look that I refuse to believe aesthetics aren’t usually the dominant factor, even when there is messaging.

A common use in movies is for volumetric lighting to add to a sense of nostalgia, and I think this is literally as simple as ‘dusty rooms create volumetric light when the dust gets lit up, and dusty rooms make you think of the past because it means you haven’t been in that room for a while’.

I love that things like this are so simple but when used subtly, your brain doesn’t really do the middle step, like a magic trick. Other ones I notice pretty frequently are the light from a window generating ‘prison bars’ (in fact I think the awesome shot from Handmaid’s Tale above is a subtle version of this trope) and to convey a feeling of sacredness (since you often see this type of light coming from the clouds, which I’m guessing is because it passes through enough atmosphere that you get the dusty room effect).

Anyway, I mostly like volumetric lighting because it looks nice, especially when it’s colorful, so I wanted to learn how to make some with watercolors, since this is my preferred way to mess around after work.

However, it was Inktober, so with an experimental attitude in mind, i set out to make as big a mess as possible, mixing up ink and watercolor willy nilly in my quest for the perfect volumetric light!

Total Joke of a Painting #204

First attempt

I had been watching the German Netflix TV show Dark (actually pretty sweet and uses fairly stylized lighting) and thought I’d kick things off with the classic ‘fog in the trees’ painting (there is a lot of fog, trees, and the color yellow, in the German Netflix TV show Dark). So, in watercolor the best thing to do is to start with light to dark, so I painted a big fat light source top right in yellow, and then let it spread out with some water to make some fog mixing with light.

Now normally with watercolor painting, the key when things don’t immediately go to plan is not to panic. In fact, master watercolor painter Joseph Zbukvic says there’s a moment in every painting in which you think all is lost and just have to have faith. So if he’s in mental anguish in his best paintings, we can all take solace in that.

However, from what I can see reviewing this painting, when things did not immediately work out, I basically said ‘fuck it’ as you can see from the tree trunks. In fact, in retrospect if I had said ‘fuck it’ maybe about 50% of that amount, I might just have got away with something, but as it stands, even the most shameless presentation of this work as modern would fall on deaf eyes. Next painting.

Driving Home at Night