Lighting + Shading: Make your Art Shine!

Maria Malandrino introduces herself and her new tutorial on shading and lighting, a drawing stage that can have a huge impact on the viewer’s perception of an artwork!

After reviewing some theories behind shading and lighting, Maria will show you how an artwork can be affected and improved by good lighting. She will also teach you how to use layers and blending settings in Procreate to achieve the results you expect.

In this tutorial Maria will use Procreate app on iPad Pro, but the basic principles of the course hold good for any other tablet and drawing software.

Before getting started you first need to set up your canvas in Procreate.

In this lesson Maria will show you how to create the type of canvas that best suits your needs in terms of shape, size and DPI (to ensure your image prints sharp and crisp).

Then, you will be able to import  a flat colour image into your canvas or use the available psd file. You can also sketch something out on the canvas right before getting started.

   1 practice character PSD with sample lighting layers.

Before practicing with shading and lighting it’s better to review some basic rules on how a shadow is formed. In this lesson, Maria illustrates two main types of shadows, the cast shadows, and the form shadows. She also provides some examples of how they appear and differ, depending on the source of light that generates them.

In this lesson you will learn how to make the most out of a character in a scene using a common photographic setup called 2-point lighting. You will get familiar with lighting principles and concepts such as the key light, the fill light and the rim light (3-point lighting), and will see how they are used in some practical examples.

In this final lesson you can see how Maria creates and uses gradients to alter the perception of the time of day, to set the desired mood and atmosphere of the scene and to add more colour variation to a character.