I've been very lucky this week to pick up two amazing art books; Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, and Imaginitive Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist. Both by James Gurney, the creator of Dinotopia, they are collections of just about anything you could want to know about art. They cover different kinds of lighting, compostion, making models, reference and so much more. I wish that would have found these sooner. And they relate them back to science, explaining why the light would shift to this color or the shadow at a certain location would stretch. An absolute must for anyone in the art world.
I picked them up because I'd been working on a piece that involved dappeled light and could not find any good resources on how to reproduce it on a moving object. (This work might not see the light of day, ever)