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Art Tutorial
Fatal Flaw, Showing the Light Source
A Lesson to Learn from Spielberg's Tintin

Steven Spielberg excited the world with his movies that drive and energize emotion. His recent work, The Adventures of Tintin, was lackluster. This was unexpected, as well as puzzling. How could Spielberg not delivery in what he normally does brilliantly?

Tintin is a cartoon, and visual art rules cartoons. If the visual concept is misconceived, the music, story, and character can't save it. Tintin had one fatal flaw: the artists composed half the scenes showing the sources of light.

Sources of light are such things as light bulbs, candle flames, the sun. They create a difficult visual problem: sources of light are many times brighter than any reflective lights.

For instance compare a light bulb to the light on someone's face, or the sun to the moon. In art practice this means that all reflective light, such as a face, has to be dimmed big time. Some artists don't bother with this ratio and simply light up the face because they feel like it. But then they don't create a believable light experience, as in this Stomer painting below. The candle light is merely the shape of flame and it is no brighter than the light on her face.

Stomer, Woman Counting Money.

Great artists, like Rembrandt, solve this problem by painting people and objects by reflected light. In this way we experience the feeling of light. We don't see the source, we see its results.

Rembrandt, Man Counting Money.

In the Rembrandt below, notice how the brilliant indirect light silhouettes the Christ figure and highlights the expression of Emmaus. Also notice how bright the painting feels, yet we are also drawn to the characters.

Going back the Stomer painting, notice what happens when we block out the candle. We follow the light and how it moves around her face, hands, and clothes. Everywhere we look makes sense. When the candle flame was present we short circuit, because the candle flame logically has to be a lot brighter than the artist painted it.

Turning to the stills from The Adventures of Tintin. Notice how our eyes naturally move to the brightest points: the bulb over the door, and wall lamp. The next brightest things are the hat and coat. Tintin and captain come last.

Look what happens when those brightest lights (the two light sources, and the bright hat and coat) are simply knocked out of the picture. We see the captain's expression, with little else to distract our eyes.

If the artists had knocked out the light sources, they would have been free to add more light to the characters.

Now with the increase of light on the characters we feel the captain's urgency, and notice his clenched fist.

With that concept in mind examine the following Tintin stills and the manipulations.  

In this last image notice now how Tintin is intensely reading, and the book's pages light his face. This is a better visual communication which drives what he discovers in the book, not the freak'n lamp on the wall.

If artists simply delete the light source from view and give more light to characters they will create a more personal, real, and energized vision.

I hope you enjoyed seeing light in different way.

Michael Newberry
Santa Monica, January 2012

copyright 2012 by Michael Newberry