Mastering Semi-Realistic Painting by Light and Shadow by Sangsoo Jeong

This is not theory-only painting class. 14-year veteran Sangsoo Jeong shows how he actually works on real game jobs, from rough plane sketch to polished semi-realistic finish with light and color doing the heavy lifting.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Sketch fast and solid with lines vs planes for better forms
• Build intuitive human figures for stylized semi-realism
• Set up efficient lighting and paint correct shadows
• Use local value to control volume and depth
• Apply color relativity, contrast, and visual weight
• Compose dramatic layouts with contrast and negative space
• Render semi-realistic skin, costume, and oil-textured finish

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic drawing fundamentals, comfortable sketching characters and human figures
• Tools: Photoshop or similar digital painting app, drawing tablet with pressure support
• Hardware: PC or laptop that runs Photoshop smoothly, 16GB RAM recommended

📝 Description

You know that moment when your drawing looks fine but the color kills it? Flat, muddy, no punch. This course fixes exactly that. Sangsoo Jeong breaks down his daily routine for semi-realistic rendering, local value, and oil-textured coloring so you can get depth without over-rendering every pixel.

You start with plane sketching. Not pretty lineart, but fast shapes that hold structure. Then you set up light like you mean it — where the key light sits, where shadows actually fall, and how light and shadow build volume. Jeong shows coloring examples based on local value, so you stop guessing colors and start controlling them.

Then comes the part most tutorials skip: relativity. How a color shifts depending on what sits next to it, how complementary contrast can trick the eye, how area changes visual weight. Once you get this, fixing a dull painting becomes logical. Less repainting, more deliberate tweaks to value, saturation, and detail density.

Last stretch is all production. Dramatic composition, eye flow with contrast, smart use of negative space, and full walkthroughs of game illustrations in Jeong’s style. Includes 16 practice examples, demo files, and 5 essential brushes so you can copy the setup and paint along at full speed.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Illustrators who can draw but struggle with coloring, light, and polished finish
• Aspiring game / freelance artists who want a portfolio-ready semi-realistic workflow

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Sangsoo Jeong is a 14-year veteran illustrator and concept artist, best known as the lead artist behind League of Legends Shadow Evelynn. He has spent years in professional game production doing game illustration, character design, and final splash work. At Coloso he shares the exact coloring routine, rendering habits, and efficiency tricks he uses on client work, built for artists who want to compete in the freelance and game art market.

🏁 Final Result

• A finished semi-realistic game character illustration with dramatic lighting, solid composition, and polished painterly rendering — ready for portfolio and freelance pitches.

📢 Guys, this is a Group Buy campaign, check the GBC forum thread to get access

You can find the course preview in the download section below.