Lights!!

I've been thinking a bit about how I'm drawn to images that have very distinct lighting. In art history classes, I favored the chiaroscuro paintings of Caravaggio, Velázquez, and Rembrandt to other pieces with less dimensionality. Can I help it that the first female artist to appear in art history class was also a chiaroscuro painter?

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant, ca. 1625

I'm drawn to the eerie qualities of lighting figures so that most of them appears in shadow, a useful and beautifully effective way to wrap a character in mystery. But what happens when the light makes up more of the image than the darkness? I can attribute my first realization of this when I recognized the beauty in the titles of "Six Feet Under"

Though I didn't particularly get into the show, I thought the opening credits were simply stunning and they sent me into an imagery frenzy for a script idea I was contemplating at the time. The script never really turned into anything because I realized most of what I was "envisioning" was literally visual and required few spoken words.

So, when I began looking for inspiration today, I found myself looking through blogs that listed photoshop tutorials, and though I began this train of searching on smashingapps, I wound up looking through a blog from Vandelay Design of Photoshop tutorials and inspirational images. Interestingly enough on of my favorite images led me to this tutorial for creating neon effects by Tony Ariawan, which I am going to have to try out!

Stop Haunt Me Every Day 04 by Tony Ariawan