Art Tips for Vibrant Lighting
Some tips and tricks for getting glowy, beautiful, vibrant lighting effects…especially in traditional art, with no ctrl+z! The example piece is a watercolor work in progress of mine and, if you’re familiar with watercolor, you know it’s super unforgiving. What you put down stays!
Tip 1: Create a thumbnail
Do a very loose, messy sketch of your illustration. This helps define the composition, but it can also help you pick where your light is coming from and what colors you’ll use for it. This way, you can reference the light source and colors while you’re painting!
Even if you’re working digitally, this creates a great color key you can turn back to. You can make a thumbnail digitally or traditionally.
This thumbnail only took about 20 minutes…and it’s saved so many headaches during the painting process.
When you have a thumbnail, the rest of your painting is just a translation of those colors with a better technique.
Feel free to make many thumbnails! This is the easiest step to revise and repeat.
Use a photo for inspiration for your color scheme. I used clouds in the evening as color references.
Play around with layers and effects (like overlay, multiply). This can help you figure out new colors that you can then try to capture traditionally!
Tip 2: Don’t forget about your lines!
Line art is important for gradients! I did mine first, so I had to consider the glow effect too. It’s a bit blurry (as its a screenshot from a reel, lol), but you can see yellows to dark browns and blacks. This established the glow from the start!
Consider using a media you can get gradients in. I used acryla gouache here, but ink, watercolor, and even markers can work well!
If it’s hard to visualize highlights in line art, do the lines after with pen or paint! Adding shadows and highlights that way can be easier.
Tip 3: Start with big gradients first
Once you have your sketch on paper finished, start with large gradients! This helps define your light source and keep your whole composition making sense.
Here, I started with the background sky, then added in the shadow coming off the wing before doing anything else. Take note of how helpful the thumbnail was in helping me lay this all out, too!
Tip 4: Think warm to cool
See how both the hair and wings move from warm (yellow/browns) to cool colors (blues, payne’s grey)? This is a surefire way to keep the strong light source and make it look like the light is glowing!
This is all about keeping the colors close to your light source, so if your light source is cool (like the moon), your highlights are cool and your shadows are warm tones. The key is just to keep it consistent!
Lighting isn’t just light to dark gradients. It’s also warm to cool/cool to warm!
Think about all the spots the light catches (like that one front feather on the left top). It takes a lot of thinking through, but it’ll make a huge impact! (Remember, you can always revisit your thumbnail or add more details in there)
Don’t forget about reflected light, bouncing off another surface. It’ll be more subtle than the main light source, but still there!
Love those gradients! Watercolor is meant for beautiful gradients, so use multiple colors for a glow. The feathers in the light go from yellow ochre to prussian blue to payne’s grey.
Start with the highlights first, then work into the shadows! Above, the skin isn’t even painted with shadows yet, because I wanted to get the lighting first.
This is just a WIP right now, but I hope these tips help! If you want to follow, I’ll be posting more progress pics (and the finished illustration soon too). :D
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