Hello! This is a guide for lighting tips and tricks I use for webcomic work! Trying to illustrate dozens of full-colour scenes can be daunting, and that’s where these illumination techniques come in handy! For this guide, I will be working with a screenshot of a self-made 3D model and painting on top with blending mode layers. These techniques are best to render 3D models quickly, but can also easily apply to illustrations!

 

Those with a somewhat moderate understanding of Clip Studio and how to use its basic tools will benefit most from this guide, but I will be breaking everything down step-by-step for beginners so hopefully it’ll be easy to follow. Please don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions or would like me to go into more detail about my process and I will be happy to help!

 

Below, I will share the exact image I’m working with for the rest of this guide so you can follow along. By illuminating your backgrounds with the simple tricks you will learn by the end of all this, you too can create sparkling cityscapes in record time!

 

Please feel free to save the following screenshot and follow along.

That sure is a 3D model….

 

So how do we get from this——

—-to this?

 

Let’s get started!

My quick & easy basic technique for setting up arbitrary lighting

First!!

 

For this nighttime scene, we want to start with a dark blue multiply layer right on top of the image. Easy and quick, now it’s nighttime. Feel free to tweak the hue and saturation to your liking for your favourite night palettes. You an also use gradients to make the scene really pop!

For simplicity’s sake and to focus on technique more than teaching how to work with light and shadow, I’ll be using generic, arbitrary lighting here. I’m imagining the light source is somewhere vaguely to the right of the piece and illuminating the side of the bus that’s facing us, as the viewer. You’re welcome to apply more technicality as to how lighting works, but this is just the quick & easy method.

 

On the 3D background layer, I begin to select the side of the bus that we’ll be casting light on (and eventually all the faces of the buildings and structures that are facing the same direction).

 

Here, I used the lasso tool to outline the shapes, but you can also use the magic wand tool and adjust the colour margin, or manually block in the shapes on a separate layer. The lasso tool is the quickest, messiest way. You’ll be surprised how messy the colouring can be and still look pretty good once we add all the rendering effects!

 

The selection might not be super clear in the image above, so feel free to refer to the image below:

After selecting the parts highlighted in the red outlines above, I use the “cut” tool to cut out the selection from the multiply layer.

Now, it should look like this! See how it’s already starting to look like there’s a bit of light coming from somewhere on the right to the image shining onto the bus? You can leave it as-is, or paste the selection you just cut and lower the opacity of that layer for less contrast.

Now, we can do the same thing we just did on all the faces of the buildings that are facing the same direction as the bus, because they are also illuminated by the “light source”. I cut and paste each section highlighted by different colours here separately so that the closest objects (bus, bus stop) have the most contrast, while the multiply layers for faraway buildings are set at a higher opacity.

This is a sample of how my final layers look when they’re all cut out and the opacity is adjusted. As you can see, I really did just outline everything roughly and messily with a lasso tool. For the sake of speed for comic backgrounds, this can be done super fast!

And here is how the background looks now after all those steps. It’s somewhat subtle, but now there is some contrast to the piece. There are no sparkles and lights yet, but we’re getting somewhere!

 

Actually, if you use the “lock transparent pixel” function on these layers, you can now recolour them for some pretty nice results already. Some examples below!

To achieve this effect, I turned the multiply layers into add (glow) instead, and made it orange. Then, I went over the original multiply layer lightly with a blue airbrush.

 

Here are a couple more colour adjustment examples:

Now, let’s go back to the original basic night scene to add some glow effects, which are the bread and butter of sparkly night scenes. On a bustling street at night, there are street lights, traffic lights, lights from cars and windows…

 

We’ll add these to our scene next!

Adding the city lights

By now, I’m sure you’re used to the go-to technique in this guide—-selection! On the 3D background layer, we’re going to be selecting everything that we want to have light inside, starting with windows! I used the magic wand tool for these, and highlighted my selection in red so you can see it more clearly.

 

For these shops, I imagine they’re open at this time so all the windows and doors are going to be selected. Then, we can fill the selection with a suitable colour and change it to an add (glow) layer. I also added some gradients here.

For the high-rise buildings in the back, not all the windows are illuminated. I picked a few with the selection tool and then filled it with a glow layer. Actually, because the colour of the buildings in the back are so much darker, the glow isn’t glow-y enough even with a bright colour. Easy fix, just duplicate the layer until it’s bright enough! You can also decrease the opacity for vice versa.

Here, I also added a second multiply layer for all the faraway buildings to increase the contrast between the main street and the office buildings. Now it’s starting to look like a night scene…!

 

Now we repeat the same process with all the office buildings.

Now it’s really starting to look like a night scene! There are a few more things we can do to make everything really, REALLY pop.

The first, duplicate the layer with all the glowing windows and add some gaussian blur! This will make the glow stronger and diffuse a bit.

The second, give your lights some light! Add some glow to the street lamps, the bus lights, and if your illustration has them—-traffic lights, car headlights, etc. You can just use the selection tool to colour in all the lights that emit light (ha ha), and then use as much gaussian blur as you need or a soft airbrush to really brighten up the night.

Now, that’s a night scene for sure!

 

Actually, this was when I noticed the blur from the faraway office buildings isn’t quite enough. Being a 3D model with no depth, the lines are too crispy for my liking. Of course, for a webcomic panel people aren’t going to notice that. But if you want to blur out the background just a little bit…

I basically duplicated this section and gaussian blurred it to bring the focus to the main street. Not going to go into depth on how it’s done because this is a really minor addition that doesn’t change the piece too much!

 

Speaking of minor additions……

Because I used the lasso tool so messily, if you zoom in, some parts can look kind of bad. If I wanted to be a perfectionist, I can fix up some of the lines by painting on top. This is also a good time to see just how bad some of the shading is, and how you probably didn’t even notice (or did you?)…

This is our final night scene, and we can leave it at that unless you wanted to try working with the snowy scene I shared at the beginning of the guide. I experimented with some new techniques in order to match the holiday vibe for this theme. Though we don’t have lanterns and Christmas lights, because it’s January already, the cityscape is going to be sparkling with snow!

Now, make it snow, and make it glow!

To tell you the truth, this was actually a bit of a happy accident—-I actually intended on adding some stars to the sky and call it a day! I used the default droplet brush and sprinkled some stars, only to realize because I painted everything on top, I’d have to manually erase the “stars” from the buildings. Or I could just add more stars and gaussian blur them to make them glow like an attempt at bokeh lights?

Anyways, it looked too much light snow so here we are—-motion blur at a diagonal, 120 degrees so it looks like snow flurries in motion. Super easy, and it looks pretty nice too as a bonus.

Using the default tone scraping brush now, which is what I will be using for the rest of the snow details, I can now coat the ground in powdery snow. The large areas like the street can be lightly brushed with a large brush!

And a small brush works perfectly to for places where the snow start piling up!

 

This part is pretty methodical and lots of fun, actually! It’s like building a virtual snowman, only it’s a snowy street….but you can probably add a snowman pretty easily.

Here, I figured the street itself would probably be rid of snow after a bit of traffic, so I erased that section and added some detailing to indicate piling snow along the edge of the sidewalk. Like everything so far, it’s a bit arbitrary and quite messy, but it does the job!

Some finishing touches—-a bit of a blue glow to make the whole piece pop!

And a warm glow on the other side to balance it out!

And we’re finished!

 

If you’re following along with the same city street, I hope the results turned out similar or much better! And you’re just reading, I hope you learned something new, useful, or applicable in your illustrations of scenes and cities with illumination. If it can help you render backgrounds more quickly, then I’m very happy. ^^

 

Thank you so much for reading my tips, and stay warm this winter!