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WARNING!
Artists' materials are very dangerous and can cause injury or death! Use in a well-ventilated area,
read all warning labels, and keep out of reach of children! Use at your own risk!
I want to show you how to set up an artist's studio
so that you don't have glare all over your painting when you're trying to work,
and that you have good quality light.
That's the essential thing.
The first thing is, you want to mount your light as high as possible.
If your light is down low,
you're going to get uneven distribution of light on your painting.
Especially if you are doing a large painting.
You can imagine, if your light was here,
now the top of your painting is getting twice as much light as the bottom.
And that is going to be exaggerated if you have low ceilings,
and if you're working on large paintings.
We want the light as high as possible.
If you've got a fixture that hangs down into the room,
you need to get rid of the fixture, and mount your lights way up high.
The higher the better.
Next, you need need to have your easel relative to your light
at 35 degrees. Let me show you how to measure that.
What I'm doing is I'm holding this right angle
right on a painting on my easel.
I'm putting it right at my line of sight.
In other words, this part right here
should be right where your eyes are as you're sitting at your easel.
That's where I'm measuring the angle from.
I'm going to put this here.
You could use a piece of paper with one corner
folded down to create a 45-degree angle.
What we're going to do is find 45 degrees,
which is right in the middle.
So, there is 45 degrees.
And there is 35 degrees.
Notice my stick is pointing straight at my light.
OK. So, this is good,
or this is good. It doesn't have to be exact.
Thirty degrees is probably OK.
And 40 degrees is getting...
If it gets too far behind you, if you're down at 45,
then your light is too far behind you
as you sit at your easel.
The main reason you don't want your studio light
too far back behind you,
is because if it's too far back
you're going to get glare up at the top of your painting.
If it is too far above you, straight up,
then you're not going to get enough light on your paintings.
So, 35 degrees is about right.
The other thing you have to consider
is you don't want a big bright wall behind you,
or bright window behind you,
because that is also going to put glare all over your painting.
If there's glare all over your painting,
you're not going to be able to see into the dark shadows
and be able to see any detail.
If I'm trying to paint in this dark area here,
and there is glare, I'm not going to be able to see
this dark green leaf.
That's why it is so important.
The difference between that and looking at this
with glare is huge.
That's why it is so important to eliminate all the glare.
The only other thing to consider is that
you don't want a big, bright window behind your easel
just because it's distracting.
It doesn't necessarily have to be black.
No glare is going to come from the other side of your painting.
You just don't want a big, bright window.
The other thing, and this is really important,
is you want your lights to be 5,000K.
That is a color temperature.
2,000K is very orange, very yellow.
3,000K is more toward the yellow spectrum.
6,000K is more toward the blue.
But 5,000K to 5,200K (5,000 Kelvin)
is just about white, balanced light.
You have to make sure that your bulbs are white, balanced light
or you're not going to be able to see all the color that you need to.
The reason for all of this is that
they typically would have a northern light,
which was daylight coming through
a ceiling light, or real high up,
and the rest of their room was dark,
and the light source was on the outside.
Today, we have our lights inside the room
lighting up all the walls and creating glare.
That's why we have to take some measures
in order to make sure that we're not getting glare all over our paint.
The very last thing to consider,
and this is not as critical,
is if you're looking at a wet palette sitting in front of you,
if you're getting a whole bunch of glare on your palette,
it is coming from just on the other side.
It's reflecting, so if you have a window
or bright wall on the other side of your palette table,
then you're going to get some glare on your palette table.
That's not as big of a deal as on your painting,
but it is just something to consider.
You may want to consider hanging some dark fabric
on the other side of your palette table.