Dark Days

This one is actually one of my favorites. took a lot of time to construct and i kind of winged it.In the beginning i was going for a simple plastic bowl filled with glowing marbles along with a piece of cloth velvet on table.

Once i had already made the bowl and added the cloth, i decided to fill the bowl with water instead of marbles. The simulation took a lot of time but i liked the initial results. So i changed the whole scene. At this point i started working on the color scheme, materials and the lighting. I really wanted this simple picture to stand out.

I suck at explaining these things but here goes.

Lighting and Camera Setup

The bowl had to be the main focus of the whole composition, which is why everything is dark. I initially placed two light sources one at the left and one at right of the camera and fiddled with the intensities and saw how light was hitting the water and bowl at different angles. In the end i placed the light source right behind the bowl . I think here it adds to “focus” element.

Materials

So for the water itself its obvious. For the bowl itself, i wanted the back light to pass through it so we could see the splash water made. For the table i used a glossy shader with moderate roughness in order for it to reflect whatever was above it.

Color Scheme

The Last but not the least the ‘Color Scheme’. One of the things i enjoy is how things look under different color settings. NOT only look but feel. Color makes a huge impact. I personally like dark heavy color combinations but i don’t have any favorites. I here used complementary scheme here. RED and Green. I chose red to be my main color so i made the bowl red and the back light to have a light tint of green and that is all (i feel like i should add memes in between sentences).

The last thing i want to say is that i did not do these things in order. I went back and forth. I just wanted to clarify i had these three thing in my mind during the whole process.

Open for suggestions.

Ibrahim.