Backlighting: Make your figure stand out!

Ever want to make your drawing look more dramatic? Add more contrast to a figure? Liven up a scene with more dynamic lighting? Backlighting is a simple yet effective lighting method that emphasizes your subject by lighting them from behind, whether directly or at an angle. This highlights your figure by casting its front in shadow while illuminating its edges, lending it a halo effect.

 

Today, as part of this month's tutorial challenge, I'd like to share how I personally like to do backlighting as a CSP tablet user. I'll show you how to both do more simple full-character backlighting (great for comics, etc) and more detailed portrait shading.

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Understanding Backlighting/Gathering Reference

First, for the not-so-fun but super important part -- studying and understanding lighting! (Yay!)

 

If you're anything like me, you want to skip the theory and get straight into drawing, but understanding your subject is key to making your art stand out.

 

I would always highly suggest grabbing several reference images for your piece. Using 3D assets within CSP to get a more specific idea on how light will land on your scene is a great start, and you'll see that I use them repeatedly throughout the tutorial, but you should also use real-life reference photos, whether you take them yourself or find them on the internet, since CSP models can't account for certain nuances in lighting, such as subsurface scattering on skin.

I had already used a 3D model for pose reference for one of my drawings, so I was able to get a good idea of how the lighting should look by adjusting the model's light source and intensity.

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Method 1

With that out of the way, let's get drawing!

 

We'll start with our flat colored figures. Here I’ve drawn both a full-body and a bust, we'll call them Delia and Jeanie, since those are the first two names that came to mind. For this first method, we'll be focusing on Delia.

If you're good at mixing colors, you can start by painting in your flat colors completely in shadow. If you're like me and your brain doesn't work that way, you can paint your flat colors normally, fill a multiply layer with a shade opposite your light source, clip it to your color layer, and adjust it based on how dark you want your shadows. This also allows you to play with the shade and intensity of your shadows as you go.

 

At this point, I also added in a temporary dark background at this point to make the lighting stand out more down the line.

Create a Soft Light layer and clip it to your flat colors as well. With a light color and a soft brush (I used the default “Soft” airbrush tool) roughly go over the parts of the subject that will be illuminated. You can see here that I used a 3D model as a guide. Set this layer to around 35-50%.

Next, create an Add (Glow) layer above the previous and clip it like the rest. Set it to around 40-50% and, with a regular marker (I used one I downloaded from the Assets Store, but something like the Turnip Pen would also work well) draw more refined highlights.

Depending on the color and intensity of your lighting, feel free to play around with other blending modes like Soft Light, Hard Light, Add, and Glow Dodge as well as with the opacity of both lighting layers.

For some added depth, create and clip another Soft Light layer and use the gradient tool and your light color to emphasize the light source. Then create and clip a Multiply layer and, using your shading color, create an overlapping gradient in the opposite direction. Set the layers to ~25% and ~45% opacity respectively and adjust to your liking.

To give a better idea of how this lighting looks in practice, I added one of the default CSP materials as a background and drew the shadow cast on the ground on a Multiply layer underneath the flat colors. The background sort of gives it the vibe of a dating sim, but you get the idea.

Method 2

Next, let's turn our attention to Jeanie. Being a closer shot, I want the lighting on her to be more detailed. To make her stand out even more, I want to use pink lighting.

 

Like before, I filled in the flat colors normally, then clipped and filled a Multiply layer above it. This time, I used a dull gray-ish green color to contrast the pink light.

This time, since we’re using colored lighting, we'll be using a Glow Dodge layer to add the rough highlights, as this blending mode retains more of the color’s saturation. With a vibrant color, roughly lay out the main places light would hit your subject based on your reference. I first used a marker to map out the lighting, then softened the edges with the “Soft" airbrush tool and “Soft" eraser and lowered the layer's opacity.

Create an Add (Glow) layer and clip it to the rest. Using the same color, emphasize the points that receive the most light.

Now let's take a moment to focus on the hair. Return to the initial Glow Dodge layer and give the light a more hair-ish texture with the Turnip Pen, a hard eraser, and the Fingertip blender.

Then, add highlights to the hair. I'm personally a fan of those big, gloopy cartoon highlights, so I drew some on a Soft Light layer with the Turnip Pen.

At this point, I revisited my Add (Glow) layer, adding highlights to the eyes and adding a slight gradient at the tips of her bangs.

Finally, like last time, create two layers, one Glow Dodge and one Multiply, and create overlapping gradients of your light and shading colors on either. Play with the opacity until you're happy with the result.

Finished! I didn't add a background for this sketch since she'd just be a floating head…

Conclusion

So those are two ways I like to add backlighting to my character drawings in CSP! Please leave a like or favorite if you found this helpful, and feel free to comment if you have any questions. Thanks for reading!