Painting term for the reflective lighting of a surface?
In oil painting especially, I believe there is a technical word for the light that's reflected from one surface onto another (in the scene that's being painted). For example, if there's a reddish-brown rock next to a white wall, the color of the rock is reflected, almost like a glow, off the wall. Likewise, I have some blue boxes under some florescent lights that create a blue glow on the ceiling directly overhead.
I'm also interested if there's a corresponding term in physics for this phenomenon.
There are 5 kinds of color that we perceive
- Primitive
- Reflective
- Refractive
- Transmissive
- Emissive
I don't have a good source for you. This comes from 20+ years in and around the arts industry.
I found the answer I was looking for and it shed some light (no pun intended) on similar terminology, as well.
In a blog entry by James Gurney, an illustrator and realist painter (source, my emphasis):
Color bleeding is a term used in the computer graphics industry to describe the way the color of an illuminated surface influences the surfaces around it.
Traditional painters usually refer to the effect as “reflected light" [. . .].
He also uses the phrase "colored spillover". Later, a commenter adds (my emphasis):
The computer graphics term for this effect is "colour bleeding", "indirect lighting" or "global illumination".
"Radiosity" is a specific method of achieving this effect, which was one of the first methods which was practical. As the geometry in scenes got more complex and models for the way light reflects on surfaces got more sophisticated, the radiosity method fell out of favour because it simply didn't scale up.
As far as the physical phenomenon, I think coleopterist is close with diffused reflection; however, this seems to describe how we see the object itself–not its reflection off another object.