Foreword
Thanks so much for getting my lighting tutorial. I had a ton of
fun creating each of these variations, and you can very easily
replicate this process in your own paintings. I hope you enjoy
reading through my thoughts and learn something new. If
you’d like to support this content, please consider
getting a full-length tutorial, my brushes, or other
resources on Gumroad!
Teaching
I love teaching illustration and have had the opportunity to
teach a variety of students. I taught illustration courses at
Woonsocket High School, co-taught a preclinical medical
illustration course at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown
University, and founded illustration clubs at Lexington High
School and Brown University.
Best Viewed as ePUB
This content is best viewed as an ePUB file through Apple
Books or through an ePUB reader. There are numerous image
galleries in this book that you can swipe through in order to
see my illustrations in various stages. If you were to read this
as a PDF, you’ll see only one image in each stack. It’s still
readable, but not nearly as interactive.
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Jingsketch
Process Overview
I’m going to begin by describing my general process
when approaching digital painting.
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Sketch Layer
I always start each painting with a
sketch. I am not comfortable going
straight into brush-strokes and shapes,
so what I do is create a simple sketch
first, such as the one shown below.
look. I’m really careful at this stage as
well, and I make sure that there are few
to no mistakes. I’ve found that it is
much harder to fix something the further
along you are in a digital painting,
especially if you are an artist who takes
advantage of numerous layers.
Blocking Out Colors
I’ll lower the sketch’s opacity to
somewhere between 10-15% and begin
blocking out the colors with a new layer
using a brush I named Fill Outline.
Lower the opacity of your sketch.
This is mainly to establish the
composition and for me to get a feeling
for how the overall painting is going to
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To use this brush, draw around the
outline of your object. Then, using
Procreate’s bucket tool, drag the color
from the top right directly into the the
outlined space. This saves you time
from having to paint the entire color
block. I’ve shown how to use this brush
in the images to the right.
Now that you’ve blocked in one part of
your illustration, it’s time to block
everything else out. This stage of the
painting process may take you a while,
but I urge you to be patient with it. As
you block out each part, feel free to lock
the layer and start painting textures
within them.
Adding Lines Again
Lighting
After this stage of the painting, I create a
new layer and create new lines that are
clean and smooth, setting the layer
blending mode to either multiply or
linear burn. I make sure to never draw
a line on the outline of an object, though
this part is entirely personal preference.
See what I mean below. It’s subtle.
Now I move onto my favorite part of
each of these paintings — lighting. The
way I used to approach lighting for
these painting was to use pure white rim
lighting. I usually set these layers to the
add blend mode or the normal blend
mode. Then, I’d duplicate this white rim
lighting layer and Gaussian Blur it by
15-20% and set it to around 30%
opacity. This way, your strong light has a
halo around it that glows.
Line layer turned off.
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Rim lighting before duplicated blurred layer.
While painting lights, I have my subject
selected so that I don’t paint outside of
the lines.
Finally, I’ll add overlay layers to correct
the colors and to find a mood that I
resonate with... and that’s it! This is a
simplified version of my process. You
can dissect the specifics by looking
through my original files.
Portrait Lighting
With these paintings, I explored how to paint different
lighting schemes with one subject. I began by painting a
girl in a neutral light, and with each new lighting scheme,
I used the same strategy to create dynamic lighting.
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Painting Process
To light this portrait, I consistently used two kinds of layers —
multiply and add. The multiply layers were used to darken the
portrait enough to where lights added would pop, and the add
layers would be painted as lights in the scene.
Repeatable
Swipe through the images to the right to understand how I
organized my layers and how I used them to create believable
lighting schemes.
The color of the multiply layer that’s used to darken the
subject should match with the color of the background. In
the case to the right, the background color chosen was blue.
Therefore, the color I used for my multiply layer was a blue. To
make things simpler, you could actually just color drop the
multiply layer’s color from the background. That’s what I did.
The add layer that was added in next could be any color that
makes you happy. For me, I imagined that a gold and blue
color scheme would work well since the two colors act
synergistically together as they’re basically complimentary.
The great thing about this lighting strategy is that it is
repeatable. If you wanted to, you could just change the HSB
values via the Color/Saturation slider to quickly see how other
light colors would work, shown to the right as the last image.
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Step 1. Base painting
Repeatable (cont.)
Because this strategy is repeatable, to the right you can flip
through a gallery of different lighting schemes that I came up
with. Each of them was very easy to arrange.
If you follow the layer organization that I described earlier, it will
be just as easy for you to light a character that you’ve created.
The only caveat is that the base painting should be very simply
lit, using darker values derived from where creases or surfaces
get close to each other — a concept called ambient
occlusion.
Subtle Differences
You might run into times where your lighting doesn’t look
believable even though the values are there. That’s when you
have to start thinking about the way that light hits your eyes.
For example, when you create a visible direct bright light, there
is going to be a glow around it called a light halo. And if you
light a person or something organic, there might be a bright
ring of saturated color around where the light hits called
subsurface scattering. On the following page, those
concepts will be explained and illustrated.
Scheme 1. Neutral
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Lighting Tips
When it comes to lighting, there are subtle things that really
push it further. Here are 2 practical techniques that, in my
opinion, are really important to nail down. I use them in
almost every single one of my illustrations.
Light Halos
When strong light hits your eyes, it’s often surrounded by an
intensely saturated ring of color. By having a saturated ring of
color around a bright area, your eyes instinctively squint as if
hard lights were hitting them. Shown to the right is a light
without this glow. It looks more flat, even though the values are
correct. When you go to the next image, you’ll see what a glow
around a light source does to improve the believability of the
lighting. Use a hard light or an add layer here.
Subsurface Scattering
In the world of rendering, a phenomenon called subsurface
scattering is often the secret to creating a realistic organic
surface. By having a bright light shine on a surface of an
object, the reverse surface of the object will glow with intense
saturation. This is evident especially in skin as the capillaries
carrying blood underneath are illuminated. To the right, I’ve
illustrated this concept with the back of the girl’s ear. To
achieve this look, simply use a color dodge layer set to a
saturated red-orange.
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Without light halo.
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