I want to talk about something I see in a lot of TV animation backgrounds. I think it comes up because of a combo of reasons, but essentially it's an extra 5 minutes of work that would probably improve about 95% of BG paintings!!

Here's a rough painting of a room. Let's say all of the colors are correct, the level of rendering is sufficient. This is a useable BG, but everything is getting hit with the same level of light. Here's where a little knowledge of photography can help.

Here's the same room but as if we're inside of it and our eyes have adjusted to the light inside. Maybe we just removed the window shades. Everything outside is blown out, but everything inside looks nice and bright. This is the default lighting setup for Tig N' Seek.

Here it is again but with out eyes adjusted to the outside as if we're looking outside. Things seem a bit dark inside. If we put a character in there, we'd have to color them darker than their main model. This BG would work well if we were looking at a character outside.

And here's a version where both effects are used. Looks pretty dramatic, but requires special lighting keys. probably with rimlights and shit. It could work if there's the right budget or right planning.

That's all! that lighting addition took very little time, using single color dodge and multiply blend mode layers in photoshop. A little goes a long way. Keep in mind your friendly local color designer!

One more thing: notice i removed the shar shadow behind the plant. While there is indeed light bouncing around in there, it wouldn't cast a shadow inside a shadow that strongly.

A lot of people have mentioned that lighting scenes this way might interfere with the animation or cause more work when characters animate between areas of light. That's totally valid and one of the "combinations of reasons" I mentioned.

With a bit of planning you can make it work. On TnS we always try to keep the characters either in a shadow or lit area within a given scene. There's more room to do this in outdoor scenes, but in later episodes we started getting bold and doing it inside as well.

at the very least brighten your windows lol