Michelle's iPad Creative Course: How to Bring Light into the Darkness
Whether stars in the sky, a city at night, or magical creatures: some illustrations only come to life with the right lighting effects. I'll show you how to easily create them in Procreate.
In digital art, I have the advantage of being able to easily paint with bright colors on dark, and thus bring light into my art. This creates magical effects and is not that difficult.
The instructions are based on the drawing program Procreate, which can only be used on an iPad. However, you can also transfer the principle to other digital art programs.
If you are just starting your digital art career or are looking for further inspiration, you can find my previous course parts in this article:
Paint your motif
Before something can glow, I first need an ordinary illustration. It is important that the area that is supposed to glow later is on its own layer. However, I generally put every color on its own layer – including the outlines. For these instructions, the yellow areas are particularly important. I have marked them in blue for you in the screenshot of my test motif.
Bring light into the darkness
For my firefly, I want to make the dots on the wings and, of course, the light bulb it carries glow. For this, I will show you two different methods that will then illuminate the darkness.
Option 1: Gaussian blur
In this option, I duplicate the layer with the yellow dots. Then I apply the effect "Gaussian blur" with a strength of about eight percent. This then looks like this:
The luminosity here is still very gentle, so I duplicate this blurred layer again and merge it into one layer. Now the dots glow much more intensely. To top it off, I change the layer property, called blend mode, to "Negative Multiply". This makes the light appear warmer and blend more harmoniously into the wings.
That's all there is to the magic:
Option 2: Airbrush
I really like the second option for the light bulb. For this, I create a new, empty layer directly below the black outlines.
Then I select the soft airbrush from the Procreate library. As a color, I use a slightly brighter yellow than the base color. Now I generously paint over the area of the light bulb. This gives me the effect that the light bulb also illuminates the firefly.
Here, too, I then select "Negative Multiply" as the blend mode.
If that's not enough for you, you can also apply Option 1 here: simply duplicate the yellow layer of the light bulb and blur it with eight percent "Gaussian blur". This gives the light bulb an additional soft glow.
That's it. Congratulations on your enlightenment! If you want to share your picture, I'm always happy to receive a nice email.
Ever since I learned how to hold a pen, I've been doodling away in bright colours. Thanks to my iPad, digital art has also become part of my life. That's why I love testing tablets – from the graphic design range to the regular kind. When I feel the urge to express my creativity without lugging lots of equipment, I go for the latest smartphones and start snapping away.
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