How to Light Your Art Studio: Brightness, Color Temperature, CRI and MORE

Hello and welcome back to my channel. My name is Marianne, I'm a professional artist, and in this video I will be walking you through how to properly light your art making space. Today we are going to be covering brightness, color temperature, the color rendering index, and working with natural light. We'll also be covering some common issues that you may be experiencing with your lighting, how to diagnose them, and some solutions that you can implement regardless of your budget. If you have any questions whatsoever throughout the video, please don't hesitate to write me a comment. Each section of this video is time stamped and I've also included a demonstration in every single one of the sections so that you can get a clear understanding of what it is that I'm describing. We are going to dive straight in, but I did also want to add that you should not let a lack of proper lighting prevent you from making your art. Art made in less than ideal lighting is still better than no art made at all. Lighting is also not something you can prescribe. Like I can't sit here and give you a one size fits all solution because there's just too many variables to take into consideration. So even after watching this video, you will need to play around with things and figure out your own customized setup. I want you to think of this video almost like I'm giving you the ingredients and a few recipes to try out, but at the end of the day, you're still going to have to cook. All right, let's dive in. The most important thing you need to remember when lighting your space is that no matter what, you are going to be compensating in the other direction. What I mean by that is that if your space is too bright, you're going to try and compensate for that by creating work that's just too dark. If your space is too warm, you're going to compensate by making things that are too cool. Understanding this principle is going to help you diagnose whatever it is that's going on in your own unique space. But we'll cover all of this as we move throughout the video. We are also going to be using this light bulb box that I picked up from Home Depot. I want to make it abundantly clear that they did not sponsor this video and it is not a product placement. I simply chose this box because it has all of the information written on the outside that you will need to know. The first element of lighting that you should know about as an artist is brightness, which is measured in lumens. Now, you might say, no, it's measured in watts. You get a 60 watt bulb, a 40 watt bulb, a 100 watt bulb. And yes, that is actually typically what most people think of when they think of brightness. And that used to be how we would measure how bright a light bulb was by how much power it was drawing. But with LED technology, that's actually an antiquated term. A bulb that is labeled 60 watts might actually only be drawing 15 watts of power. Regardless of whether you're using an incandescent bulb or an LED bulb, a 60 watt bulb is actually providing you with 800 lumens of brightness. Now, if you're looking for how many lumens your light bulb has, simply check the box and it should tell you. You can also check the base of the bulb because most companies actually do print the number of lumens onto the bulb itself. So why should you as an artist pay attention to the brightness? One word, value. Value is the scale measuring how light or dark something is. And brightness directly impacts your ability to read, interpret, and create appropriate values in your art. For example, if you're making art in a space that's too dark, you're going to overcompensate and try and lighten your values. But this works both ways. And if you're making art in a space that's too bright, you're going to overcompensate by making your piece too dark. For a long time, that's what I was doing. Now let's translate that into lumens. When we think about a workspace, we typically need a higher level of brightness than in other areas of your house. Areas such as your living room or dining room might feel cozy and intimate when you have a lower level of brightness. But when you're in your workspace, it needs to be a little bit higher so that you can interpret your work correctly. In this particular workspace, I did the math and I usually have anywhere between 2,400 to 4,000 lumens of brightness at any given time. However, I am always adjusting that depending on what kind of exterior lighting I have. And today I actually did film up against a window to give you an idea of how much that actually impacts your workspace. My lighting is very reflexive and reactive depending on what kind of weather it is, what time of day it is. And I can adjust my brightness by either adding or subtracting bulbs to my overhead lighting or by playing around with the brightness of the bulbs inside my lamps. Now you might be wondering, well, how do you play around with the brightness of a table lamp? And the answer is actually very simple. I picked up this dimmer switch off of Amazon. It was not very much and watch this. Woo! And back down. All I've done is put a dimmable bulb in there, plugged it into this little dimmer, and now I can adjust my lighting. Just adding in that inexpensive dimmer switch has made my space completely customizable when it comes to brightness. Now there are two additional things that you need to bear in mind when we're talking about brightness. The first is proximity and the second is diffusion. When we're talking about proximity, that is how near or far your light source is. You can have a super bright light, but if it's way up high, it's going to be a little dim by the time it reaches your art. Similarly, you can have a light that's dimmer, but if it's close enough to your work, then you'll still be able to see. As a little demonstration, I'm actually going to use my studio light shining on one of my paintings. This is actually my first studio light ever, and you've probably seen something like this before. It just clamps onto your easel and you're good to go. But here's why proximity matters. Now let's just say I'm working in a darker room and I'm only using this easel light to light my painting. Let's also pretend that because I'm in a darker room, I've moved the light closer to the canvas to be able to see better. Since this light is in close proximity and it has to travel a shorter distance, it makes my work appear much lighter than it is. So as the artist, I will likely subconsciously begin to dial back my highlights and make the overall painting darker than what it needs to be. Now, this was actually happening to me about six years ago using that same studio light that I was just demonstrating, and it was driving me crazy because I would work for hours and hours and hours on a painting, turn off the light and go, it's too dark. So the solution, if you're using one of these kinds of lights, is to find the sweet spot where it's giving you just enough light to work, but it's not so close to your work that it's going to mess with your values. Again, I cannot give you a precise distance for this because I'm not sure what kind of other ambient lighting you have in your space, how strong your light bulb is, etc. But what I can suggest is that you move it around, try different spots, and if you're finding that you need a bit more light, try and boost the ambient lighting in your room as opposed to moving your light bulb closer. Now, the other thing to consider is diffusion. Take the lights that are in the lamps behind me. Basically, all that diffusion does is it catches all of those light particles and spreads them out much more softly. As a result, you are going to get much softer lighting from a lamp which has a shade versus a concentrated task light, as you can see here in this demonstration. Now, for me personally, I typically prefer a bit more of a diffused light just because I find that softer for shadows as well as glare. However, I typically actually have a balance of both. If your light source is diffused, it actually also weakens the brightness and can impact the colors. For example, the lampshades behind me have sort of an oatmeal color to them, and they will add that color to the light that they're giving off. It's not a deal breaker, it's just something to bear in mind. So to conclude this section on brightness, our main takeaways are that light is measured in lumens, lumens and brightness dictate how well you're able to read your values, proximity truly matters, and if you want to soften the quality of the brightness, then all you need to do is diffuse or make it more concentrated if you want it brighter. That was a lot, but we've still got a lot of ground to cover, so let's keep going and talk about color temperature. Fortunately, this one's a lot simpler. Let's go back to our light bulb box. When you go and pick up light bulbs, you might often see them described as daylight, soft white, warm white, and typically as artists, we always go for daylight. What you may not know is that every single one of those descriptors is actually just a spot on what is called the Kelvin scale. The Kelvin scale is simply how warm or cool a light source is. So if you have a warm white bulb, it's typically around 2,700 Kelvin. And if you have a daylight bulb like this one, it's usually around 5,000 Kelvin. On this particular box, you can find that right down here in the bottom right corner. In every single room except for the studio, I usually have 2,700 Kelvin bulbs or warm white bulbs simply because I like the soft, cozy, ambient feel that they give. Now the lamps behind me also have warm white bulbs, and the reason that they are warm versus cool in this space is because I like that little hint of warmth that they give, and they're not my primary light source. For artists who work with colors, having the right color of bulb is absolutely critical. As a general rule, 5,000 Kelvin is considered neutral lighting. Now before I knew this many years ago, I was painting under warm white bulbs, and I was consistently creating work that was too blue. The reason for this is because I was simply overcompensating in the opposite direction of my lighting. So everything was just infused with this feeling of blue. You might be thinking to yourself, well, that's not so bad. So what? Your paintings are a little blue. But what I found is that in general, people prefer warmer paintings. We want paintings to feel like they're glowing a little bit. Using 5,000 Kelvin bulbs may seem like you're going way too cool, especially if you walk from one room in your house that's really warm into your studio room, and it feels very cool by comparison. However, it is as close to neutral as you can get with your lighting, and it's usually the right choice. To demonstrate this, here's my mountain painting under my normal overhead light. I'm going to go ahead and turn those off and draw the blinds so that you can get the full impact. On the left, I have a daylight bulb, and on the right, I have a warm white bulb. As you can see, the colors on the right are now skewed yellow. So imagine that effect on the whole painting, and you'll understand why this is so important. So even if you don't love the daylight bulbs anywhere else in your home, please consider adding them to your studio, because it will make a difference in how you're able to interpret your color. Now that we've covered brightness and temperature, I want to talk about the thing that I consider to be one of the most important and overlooked things when it comes to lighting. But before we do that, I'd like to talk about this video's sponsor, Skillshare. Now this is actually my third video collaboration with Skillshare, and each time I come on camera, I've progressed a little bit further behind the scenes on their amazing platform, and I am honestly just so impressed. Skillshare is an online learning community that is designed exactly for people like you and I. Whether you're trying to improve the quality of your social media output, learn new skills in areas such as photography and videography, take classes from some of your favorite artists, or even venture into the world of artificial intelligence. Whatever your unique goals are, Skillshare offers a buffet of learning. But the cool thing is, is that the more it gets to know what your tastes are and what you're enjoying, the better it's able to offer recommendations for your next classes. Now I've personally just completed Ali Abdaal's productivity masterclass, and I even got a little badge that says I did, and I'm honestly so thrilled with how much it has helped me. Now next up, I'm planning on taking his Notion masterclass, because it seems to be the platform of choice for artists and creatives who want to keep track of all of their various projects. Now if any of this sounds like it might be up your alley or serve your goals, the first 500 people to use my link in the description will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare. If you wind up using this and take any of the classes, please leave me a comment below. Let me know what you think, because I always love hearing from people who are leveling up their learning and who use these passes. Thank you so much to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. Let's dive back in and talk about the color rendering index, or the CRI. The color rendering index simply measures how accurate a light is able to represent color. It's measured on a scale from 0 to 100, but typically most bulbs that you can find in any common hardware store start at 80. However, as artists, we are aiming for 95 and higher. Why does this matter? An easy example of the CRI would be to pretend that you're holding up two socks. One is navy blue and one is black. If you can easily distinguish between the two colors, you probably have a light that is of a higher CRI. If you're looking at those two colors going, I have no idea which one is which, you're probably dealing with a light bulb that has a lower CRI. That's why if you're reading colors and you're like, I'm not really sure if this dark color is a dark green or a dark blue or a dark brown, you might have a light bulb that has a lower CRI. Let's just go back to our little light bulb box here. Many light bulb companies have actually started to print the CRI on the sides of their boxes because of how much it matters to people now. For this particular light bulb on the side here, you'll see that it says it has a CRI of 95. 95 is great. That's all you need. And even though we would love to aim for a hundred, it's not necessarily realistic. In my own studio space, I'm currently using light bulbs from a company called Waveform. Again, not sponsored. I've had my Waveform bulbs for a few years now, and I really like them because they're flicker free and they have a CRI of 95 as well. I also have my Waveform lights, both as tube lights overhead, and I have them as individual E26 based bulbs, which I can put into any task light on my desk if I want to make sure that all of my light color is the exact same. And now a quick little demonstration to show you the CRI in action. In this demonstration, I have two bulbs. One is my Waveform bulb with a CRI of 95, and the other is this unnamed brand bulb with a CRI of 80. They are both 800 lumens and 5,000 Kelvin. So the only difference between them is the CRI. As you can see, the impact on color perception is significant. And even if I swap out the artwork, the colors still look better with a higher CRI. Now, if you're personally not sure what your bulb CRI is, and it's not printed on the base, and you've long since discarded the box, I am going to say that it might be worth investing in new bulbs. Now you don't have to throw them out. You can just move them to somewhere else in the house, but it is worth making sure that your light bulb has the highest possible CRI that you can find. Now, this is one of the most budget friendly solutions. You don't need a super fancy light. That box that I just showed you that has three bulbs was less than $20 at Home Depot. You definitely don't need a fancy light that's labeled an artist friendly light. All that they're doing is repackaging a light that has a high CRI and claiming that it's just for artists, but essentially it's the exact same technology as you can find in a cheap box of light bulbs at your local hardware store. So if you do nothing else in this video, try and find a bulb with good CRI. Last, but certainly not least, let's talk about natural lighting. Now I made the conscious decision to actually film this video up against the window because I knew that the light would shift throughout the video, but I didn't actually realize how much. I started filming when it was a bit darker, cloudier, and now it looks like it's kind of sunny. And so if I was relying on this for my sole source of light, it would not be very predictable or reliable. Now in my particular case, my window faces Southwest, but as you can probably see, it is fully treed in, which means that in the summer, the light that's coming in is green and filtered through trees, so it's not very bright. In the fall, it turns orange and gets a little brighter. And in the winter, it's most bright because there's no more leaves left on the trees, but it's also dark by 445. Now you may have heard that the best studio setup is to have North-facing light. The reason for that is because it's considered the most stable. If you think about it, if the sun rises in the East, it'll be bright in the morning, but dim at night. The South typically tends to be quite hot in terms of the lighting, and of course, West, you have the opposite problem to the East. North light is more stable simply because it's not as impacted by the movement of the sun throughout the day. However, for most of us, myself included, I can't really dictate which way my studio faces because this is what I got. So how do you work with natural light? On social media, you often see people painting or drawing in direct sunlight because it's so aesthetic and pretty, but I personally find that that's not very practical. As pretty as direct lighting may look, I find it's too bright to actually work under, and it's the indirect natural lighting that offers the best support for artists. However, this may or may not be an option in your workspace, so don't worry if you have to supplement it with artificial light because I do too. When you've got a room like mine where the natural light is constantly shifting, not only with the weather, but even just what time of day it is, you might find it beneficial to return to the earlier parts of the video and figure out how you can compensate for that. For example, in the morning when it's a little bit darker in here, I might add just a little bit more light, crank up the dimmer switch, add another bulb overhead, and then of course in the afternoon when I've got natural light coming in, then I actually reduce the brightness of the room to make up for that. As well, if you're in the kind of workspace where it's inescapable, you're going to get direct lighting. There's a few things that you can do. Number one, you can actually diffuse that lighting. Behind me, you can see some faux linen curtains from Amazon that are semi-sheer, and I'll link them in the description below that I will pull across when the light is just a bit too bright, but I still want to allow some of it through. This softens the light and allows me to still work while still enjoying some of the sunshine that has trickled into the room. Now, if you're an artist who likes to film time lapses of your work, you need to be aware that having this kind of lighting that's moving around all the time is intensely distracting during a time lapse and often results in flickering. So to prevent that, what you would need to do is seal off any natural light and just work under artificial light. That artificial light can be controlled and manipulated, whereas natural light is completely beyond your reach. So in those instances where I need to have complete and total control over my light and I need it to be stable for hours, what I'll do is that I'll pull down a blackout roller shade, which blocks out all natural light. That being said, I think that natural light is the best, and I authentically wish that I had more in this room. I make do with what I have, but there's really nothing like it. And I guess that's the takeaway of this video. All you need to do is your best in any given moment. And if that just means swapping out a light bulb for now, that's awesome. Do that. To conclude this video, aim for a reasonable but flexible level of brightness. Make sure you're using a daylight bulb that's about 5,000 Kelvin. Use a bulb with a CRI of 95 or higher and work with your natural lighting by supplementing indirect lighting as needed or by softening or blocking any direct lighting that's shining on your work. And just remember, lighting is dynamic. And unless your studio is fully sealed off, it will always be changing. But now you have the knowledge to adapt to it. I hope you found this video helpful. And if you have any questions or comments whatsoever, please leave them below. I love to hear from you. You can connect with me on any social media platform and I've included some links to some free eBooks that I've written below. Thank you so much for watching. I wish all of you great success with your art and I'll see you in the next video.