I started drawing something random a few days ago and it turned out to be a battle mage.
Or in any case a guy with an aggressive posture wielding a tool that might come across as magical. Call him a battle mage if you please.

I’m not a fan of night scenes, or anyway drawings set in poor light conditions.
There’s nothing wrong with them in general, it’s just that they’re the favourite pick of beginner illustrators and any art website is full of them.
Anyway, that’s pretty much the set of colours I started my Battle Mage with, and I stuck with it.

(Completely unrelated: while I was drawing I watched Apocalypse Now for the first time. My god what a movie. If you haven’t seen it I would recommend NOT to watch the Redux version. The bit with the French plantation people is just pointless. Anyway).

Fun things happen to our eyes under poor light conditions.
First, if the light is below a certain threshold, our cones just shut down. We can’t see colours anymore, full stop. That’s when rods are more active. As they are particularly sensitive to light, when it’s dark it’s their moment to shine (ha ha). Rods are colour blind, but they are good friends when you are trying to get to the bathroom at night. Just give the time to wake up and they’ll sort you out.

Another thing that happens under poor light conditions is a whole plethora of colour illusions appear.
First, rods are more sensitive to the frequency of green light. This means that if you place a dark green object next to a bright red object at night, the green one will seem brighter. In my battle mage all the greens are bright. Check.

Second, we tend to unconsciously associate colour with familiar objects. So we’d probably still read a pink painted lemon in dim light as a yellow one.

Then there’s the thing about blues. We tend to see moonlight as blue, where in fact it has a slightly redder component than white sunlight.
Apparently that’s due to a synaptic bridge between rods and cones, which accidentally touches the cones’ blue receptors and tricks our brain into believing we’re seeing blue when in fact cones are minding their own business, completely unaware. I mean, people who take the perfection of the human eye as proof of God’s existence don’t know what they’re talking about.

But I digress. To sum things up, colours are all messed up at night and you can get away with a lot. If I stuck with Science you wouldn’t be able to see the red robes of the battle mage. But are they red? Or do you see them as red just because the metal is green and you perceive the darker colour nearby as its opposite?
Who knows. And who cares! I was watching Brando kick ass while I did this, I just thought it looked ok, so there you go.

by Paolo Puggioni