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Lighting . . .
If you have ten reference books on the shelf, you'll find at least eight different variations on "essential" lighting. You're going to have to try different things, to capture or create the effects that you're after, given your unique location and the physical make-up of your space. As has been said, if you rely on that venerable light source, Old Sol, and if you're not doing 15-minute oil sketches, you'll not want the sunlight streaming directly into a window. In a studio I worked in for several years, all life drawing was done in the mornings, the models illuminated solely by north light admitted through a skylight and reflective shaft which was, I was told, based on a da Vinci design. But even Leonardo couldn't do anything about the fact that 9 a.m. light is quite different from noon light, and February's even from April's. That being said, there are painters who love the challenge and the opportunity to work with nature's changing palette. Unquestionably there is a special quality to natural light that is hard to duplicate artificially. (I began painting when living in the southern hemisphere, so I had to read all my reference books upside down to make sense of all this "north light" stuff.)
But the fact is, many artists have to or choose to work at times and in conditions in which natural light is unavailable or unreliable. I happen to like to paint in the evening, sometimes, and on rainy days (and Mondays). Then you get into the choices and debates about artificial lighting. Incandescent lights will produce a colour temperature different from fluorescent (warm and cool, respectively). Some respected artists use a combination of the types. [It's suggested that this provides "balance", but my intuition is that it provides "confusion", having both cool and warm lighting in both the lights and darks of your subject. I may be wrong.] The "color corrected" lighting systems are happily used by some, disliked by others. I've used a variety of shop lights, work lights (including a powerful lamp used by interior house painters, to get a uniform lighting on all surfaces in the room), and polarizing lights (I generally haven't liked these, but I'm not settled on it, yet.) I hang fabrics and clamp cardboard all around the set to direct or block light as I wish. Perhaps my most successful still-life to date was done with a garden-variety parabolic aluminum shop light, clamped to a sort of "hat rack" structure, with a 200W bulb -- BUT . . . with a 15" square of lightweight gold felt hanging in front of it, an irregular hole cut in the center of the felt to cast the strongest, cleanest light on the center of focus in the set-up (a Chinese porcelain vase), the rest of the set-up bathed in a low-intensity, diffuse gold. The painting was very difficult to execute but the results were extremely satisfying and the quick sale of the painting a bittersweet moment. I just made the lighting up as I stood there. It didn't come from any book (and I'm sure it wouldn't be approved of by most purists.)
You asked about detecting light direction. I'm not quite sure I understand the inquiry, but in any event, set the end of a brush handle or mahl stick down on top of a surface near your subject -- the cast shadow is opposite the light source. (If there is no cast shadow, then you've got more ambient than directional lighting, which is okay if you can manage it but it'll greatly diminish the extension of values on your subject.)
Experiment, until you find what works for you. There's no hard and fast rule.
Good luck,
Steven
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