I have been to many places, but... I have yet to witness a miracle. There are those who have suffered. Those who continue to suffer. Is there any way to make it end?
sylus wakes to the sound of chirping birds. which is strange. because it’s the dead of winter and the windows are closed to keep frigid blows of the snow storm out of his bedroom.
“sylus…” you groan, smacking his shoulder as if he were the source of the incessant alarm.
“it’s not me,” he grunts, sitting up. the room is still in the pits of darkness save for a pair of glowing gem eyes. the lamp flicks on with a telling click to reveal a little boy on the bedroom floor.
sylus squints. “kyros?”
“i lucian.” says the blurry blob of baby. in his pudgy little fingers he holds sweet, beloved watcher of the night, Mephisto. “morning, papa. good morning.”
“angel, get off the floor, it’s cold.” he says, shuffling out of bed and staggering over to lucian. he picks him up, and carries him back to bed.
you stir at the commotion, surprised to see a child on your bed at such a late hour. “you okay, sweetie?”
sylus frowns at him. “did you have a nightmare?”
lucian shakes his head. “no, i—i do tores.”
you fight against the weight in your lids, your limbs and your mind and cradle his face gently. “baby, it’s midnight. too early for chores.”
“nuh-uh!” he shakes his head, holding the poor mechanical bird up. so obedient in his little master’s iron death grip, not a single peep of the frustrated squawks you get when you at the very least even look at him.
mephisto opens his beak, and again the symphony of birds chirping escapes his sound-boxed throat. a gentle awakening. an alarm. a cry for help.
“gonna to walk mephie.” lucian then says, shaking the bird. again, it releases a string of bird harmonies. lucian coos at the sound, but you and sylus know better.
though made of metal, bolts and a chip, you’ve come to believe that mephisto has expanded his affinity for emotions (you call it sentience, sylus says its just good tech, you insult him for his lack of whimsy).
and with his growing advancements was child rearing, the basics. downloaded in his bird brain: babysitting for dummies, how not to scare your baby, 100 soothing ambient noises for baby, and more.
“did you wake up so early just for this?” you ask him, gently redirecting his fingers to intertwine with yours. releasing the vice grip around mephisto’s ruffled feathers. the bird chirps gratefully.
“yes, mama.” lucian nods. then glances at sylus. who, for weeks, lucian has caught coming into his and his brother’s room to summon mephisto for his morning walk. “like papa. wanna to help papa.”
an arrow shoots through sylus’s chest at that, and he pulls lucian in a tight embrace to soothe the loving ache. lucian giggles at the motion and hugs sylus back.
sylus catches your eye, just as in awe as he is at the heart your son possesses. and then you shrug, and curl up into your blanket— it’s way past his bedtime, and you have no idea how he got up at this time on his own, but you’ll let it slide just this once. “well, you heard him, my love. time for a walk.”
lucian beams at his father, who grins right back. all traces of sleep gone, he is happy to oblige lucian on his morning chore. because really, he’d do anything for his boy who would do anything for him (and their bird).
and so, he considers changing the ‘walk crow’ schedule to noon.
i'd like to add that the shadow color isnt necessarily dictated entirely by the primary light source, but the bounce light! so for the example of a sunny environment, the reason the shadows are blue are because of the light from the blue sky reflects across the environment; but, if the character were to be under tree cover, the bounce light would be coming from the leaves and thus the shadow would look greener.
If you want to do it manually instead of via layer effects and are doing digital art, then look at the R,G,B values for the colors you're working with a little bit. If you have a pure red object in cyan (B+G) lighting, it's actually going to look gray or even black because the lighting doesn't have a red component. (You can see this effect in videos showing how colored objects change appearance with depth in the ocean!) The closer your object color matches the lighting's position on the color wheel (including what's bounced), the more likely it is to be fairly close to its "default" color.
To achieve this effect in practice, I find it easiest to work from the light source as a base. I might inch the hue slider a bit towards the object color if I am okay with there being a range of colors in my light source (this is most often the case, otherwise it's monochrome and not interesting in the way we're after here), I will inch my hue just a tad in the direction of the object, and I will knock the object color towards the grays to compensate the rest of the way. If the object color is very different from the light source, it's going to get more gray and less hue shift from the light source, while an object that is closer to the light source ranges will get to be closer to its original hue and less gray.
For example, if I have a red object in cyan light, I'm not going to do much of anything to the hue since they're on opposite sides of the wheel and instead I will just drop the red to gray. If it's a very saturated red it's going to be a darker gray. If I have a yellow object, though, I'll inch the hue from cyan to maybe something a bit greener, and I'll only drop the saturation a little bit. It'll look strange if you're just starting out, but once you get more colors in it will be more cohesive. They are relative to one another, after all!
Tl;dr Most solid colored objects by and large scatter light as opposed to transmitting or emitting it, which means that they are responding to colors in the light source. If you don't have a suitably matching color in your source, your object won't respond by being the color you expect it to!
Final note, it's worth pointing out that this is true in "default" white (full-spectrum) sunlight as well, but it just so happens that full spectrum means it's got every visible wavelength in it, so there can be no mismatch between your object color and what's available from your light source!
annaxmalina
germansingergirl
2087
janainaart
