The Anatomy of the Bubble
Lately I’ve become fascinated by the idea of including bubbles in some of my current pieces. So of course, rather than go online and look through millions of available stock photos of actual bubbles to get a quick/accurate sense of how I might approach this, I just lazily sat on the floor with canvas and paint and tried to reach into my mind’s eye to figure out what a bubble should look like…
Here is the result, a not-too convincing “bubble” named Horace Littleton:
Quickly accepting that poor Horace turned out fairly effing craptastic, I decided to try again. I examined him thoroughly and tried to pick out the parts that looked “wrong” with him, and I set out to try a few varying approaches for the next attempts, assuming a proper bubble would show up among the spewage eventually…
Here’s what I got:
I think the best candidate here is the one in the top left, but this may only be due to the fact that the stark contrast against the darker background here kind of helps it along.
Let’s look again at measly, old Horace up there. I realize he looks more like a top-down view of a half sphere than he does a completely round & transparent, 3-D bubble floating in air. This is largely because I failed to include the inverted reflection of the highlight that should be visible inside the back of the sphere.
I finally trekked up to the local Five-Below and picked up some strawberry-scented bubble solution in a little pink bottle shaped like an ice-cream bar, brought it home, and whipped out my camera…
Here is a photo of real-life, actual bubbles, Jolene & Laverne (R.I.P.):
When I look closely at the anatomy of these bubbles, I notice two major visual aspects that my mind’s eye was missing. First, there is of course the mirror image of the main light source highlight and other inner reflections which indicate the convexity of the back surface. Second, I notice that the lighting of the circumference of a bubble seems to follow the same rules of lighting & shadow on a solid (non-transparent) sphere. These bubbles both show a lit edge facing my open window (main light source) and a dark edge where (a solid sphere’s) shadow would be.
I’m ready to pour out some paint and give this another go!!
Here is an in-progress shot of the painting in which I intend to include my soon-to-be-perfected bubbles:
