How to Draw Back Lighting to Enhance Your Webtoon Emotion

Backlighting is a lighting technique that places the light source behind the character or object. In comics and webtoons, it's not just for aesthetics—it's a powerful tool to convey emotion and mood within a panel.

Before applying backlighting, make sure your line art and base color are ready. Choose a color palette that fits your character.

Tip: Keep base colors in a separate folder to stay organized and make adjustments easier.

1. Base Color

2. Shading

To keep shading and rim lights consistent later, decide where the light is coming from. For example, from the back-left.

Use a Multiply Layer with a cool blue-gray tone for base shading. Shade from top to bottom, following the lighting direction.

3. Change the shading color

Change the shading color to match your color pallete better. This is my technique to color faster actually.

4. Add shading on background

Add multiply dark blue layer above the background layer.

Apply backlighting mainly on close-up or large emotional panels for maximum impact.

Examples:

• Sadscenes=coolbluetones

• Angry/dominantscenes=redtones

• Ambiguous/conflictedscenes=darkpurples

Remember this value concept. To make the character more visible make the contrast more brighter than the background

5. Add shading to character

Add shading to the character the same way you do with the background. Slightly more lower opacity, so that your character will stand out more than the background

6. Give white gradient to background

Add a white gradient behind the character to create contrast, same purpose as before, to make the character more stand out.

7. Add rimlight

Use rim light in a brighter blue to outline the character's edge with add glow layer setting. Draw this rim light above your coloring but still under the line art

8. Give texture

Add more textures and white area around the character head to make it more visible.

9. Change line art color and add more detail

Change the line art color to somewhat close to the shading. For example, since this drawing is on blue tone, then change it to blue too. Give some extra hair strands to your character to make it more appealing.

10. Add SFX

Give a gradient on the front of the panel and add a sound effect to give more feeling of guilty with the character inside the panel

11. Add more particle

Add a foliage brush to enhance your webtoon visual with black and blue to make it more better with the blue tone.

 

You can also add more sparkle effect with add glow layer to add more details.

12. Add Baloon text

Add the baloon text, and your webtoon panel is done~

Colors makes different tone and emotion to your webtoon panel, try to convey your drawing with color psychology to convey your story better.

 

Dark Red = Anger, dominance, thrill, Dangerous

Blue = Sad, Lonely, Guilty

Purple = Ambiguous, Moral conflict, Confused

Dark Green = Cold, Jealousy

Dark Yellow = Awkward, Something off

ANOTHER EXAMPLE WITH RED TONE

You can also use layer comp for testing the color pallete

Try to use the new feature, layer comp for testing your color pallete.

1. Turn on the layer comp window

go to window, and turn on the layer comp to open the layer comp window.

2. Create new layer comp

click add new layer comp for you to make another pallete testing.

3. Duplicate the layer you wanna change the color

Rather than make a new and color it from start, just duplicate anything the color you wanna change.

4. Change the color by hue and saturation

You can change the color by using hue and saturation. Change the color anything you like.

5. Change all the color

Since I wanna change them all to red tone, I duplicated the purple layer before and change it all to red, and it become like this.

6. Save your layer

When you already feel enough with the change, don’t forget to save the preview layer to the layer comp. It will be a short cut to view all the layer you turn on before.

7. Test the layer comp

Test the layer comp by clicking the eye icon.

That’s it for today, you can watch my video on youtube for better explanation and it’s also includes the speed paint too.