A digital landscape painting with oil like brushes. Two characters kiss underwater, holding hands as they float through the water. Cyrus, left, is a tall Black man and wears fantasy travel like clothes with knee boots, baggy trousers and a sleeveless jacket with fur around the neck. He has long red dreadlocks floating around him in the water and pointed ears. Niko, right, is a slim light skinned man with long wavy navy hair. He wears blue toned princely attire with thigh high leather boots and golden details. He has a long pointed ear with a red earring. The piece has blue tones with bright warm sun reflecting off the riverbed background and off their clothes.

Underwater Kiss, digital, May 2025

If there is one thing I'm known for in my artwork, it's how I use soft, often glowing light to achieve a dreamy, ethereal look. Here I describe the mindset behind my approach.

Why mindset, and not a step-by-step tutorial? My exact methods change frequently depending on the piece, outcome and medium!

I hope that this advice helps you to build a foundation of knowledge for your lighting and take into consideration yourself and apply the advice to your work—however you make it.

A digital oil like painting of two nude elven characters. Cyrus, left, is a muscular man with long dreadlocks. He is shown from behind, a glowing golden scar on his back. He holds onto Niko, right, with one arm. Niko is a slender man with quite thick thighs. He holds onto the back of Cyrus' shoulders, left arm darkened with magical scarring. He smiles as Cyrus leans his head into him. They're painted with blue shadows, pink midtones and yellow highlights.

The Love Within, digital, November 2025

Values

The foundation to good light is in values, not colour—your balance of highlights, midtones and shadows. Without this your lighting set-up might feel odd in some way and not look accurate to how that lighting would realistically work. Value helps a lot with creating form as well, which can help sell the believability behind the light you are creating.

Try black and white painting to practise, and check your coloured work in black and white as you proceed (for traditional, you can take a photo and filter it; for digital, a colour layer in black above other layers is most accurate). Working in a single hue, or a limited palette, can help with this too. Referencing a portrait lit with unnatural colours can help to see the importance of values over hue and to study temperature shifts.

Colour does matter for mood afterwards. You will see I love to exaggerate blue shadows and warm light often, or for a particularly ethereal look, use cool light with shadows that vary in hue. But for creating depth in your light, values come first.

You will often find that with strong values you can use any hues and it won't look wrong. 'Muddy' colours are often not the colours themselves, but rather that you have used a large amount of values without much edge control to go with them, and they have been perhaps over-blended. Meaning: it can help to limit your value range, as I will describe in the next section, and also your forms will look cleaner with adequate control between hard, firm, soft and lost edges.

  • Hard = hard brush strokes

  • Firm = a little softer, but still crisper than your gradients

  • Soft = blended edges

  • Lost = where your edges are softened enough that you cannot tell where one edge ends and another begins

I find context matters with edges, just as it does value. The hardest edge in a work that uses a lot of softness, like this piece below, may not be as hard as an edge in another piece. But in the context of the overall piece, there is still a difference, meaning even in something that is very soft overall you can still make out the forms.

Lysithea from Fire Emblem Three Houses is a youthful woman with small features and long white hair with a fringe, wearing mage attire. She looks to the camera above her, holding an hourglass. A black snake emerges from the background bearing fangs. She's painted with an ethereal soft glow and blue, purple and pink shades with a warm light source.

Fangs of Time, digital, July 2026

Balancing Value and Colour

As artists, we have control over what we put on a canvas. This will sometimes mean changing reality to look better in art or not being tricked by our eyes thinking something is pure black. I very rarely use pure black and white on the same painting, although it may appear this way due to relativity to the lighter values and cameras may skew this as well (see next slide). If I do use black, it will be used sparingly and at the focal point. Or alternatively, its purpose lies in exaggerating an ethereal, mysterious and/or horror look. Glowing effects work well on a dark background but I have to ensure to use a low-key value range, and use lighter values sparingly, to not be too harsh. Using pure white tends to be saved for brighter work or otherwise only small areas. For instance, candlelight.

Part of controlling value is to not try and copy every single value that might exist on our reference. As previously mentioned, this is how we can end up with a 'muddy' look. Try to group values together for coherency. You can practise this skill with timed, small studies using limited values, anywhere from 2 to 5, but no more.

I don't usually use the whole value scale and high chroma together. It suits some work, but for mine it's too harsh and takes away the ethereal quality. It's also too painful for me to work with. If I want a highly saturated piece, I will use a lower value range to go with it—wide enough to show form but more narrow than reality. If it's not as saturated I will use a wider value range. I usually fall somewhere in between high saturation and low. I save high chroma for around the bright highlights, and when I add hue differences, keep them in the same value family. Each colour has its own value at its highest saturation which we can manipulate to our needs.

As part of my style as well, I take advantage of controlling values to increase glowing effects. One key trick I use is where I will lighten areas near a highlight I want to glow, as though the light is shining and bouncing off surrounding shadows. I exaggerate it to feel particularly dreamy.

A vertical oil painting of a cheetah turning its head to the side. Its face is lit up by scattering warm light. The cheetah is painted softly, with more details given to the head as the body is pushed into the background. It has some blue tones in the shadows.

Sunlit Cheetah, oil on canvas, August 2026

Colour Relativity and Bounce Light

This is something that improved my lighting massively once I learned to pay attention to it. Colour doesn't exist in solitude; it will always be influenced by what is around it. So long as your colour is in an environment other than pure white, this will be the case. This is why values can seem too light or dark, or a colour too stark, when placed alongside other surrounding colours. Less chroma in warms will make it cool, and vice versa for cools, and you will often find a pure colour will look out of place in a palette and like it doesn't belong. Restricting ourselves to a certain colour gamut, or using complementary colours carefully, will help this. It also means that adding a colour opposite on the colour wheel to a mix, or with sliders digitally, will bring it closer to grey.

Bounce light is also vital for environments. Imagine a white dog in a grassy field. Its belly will face the ground, sunlit grass reflecting green onto it. This is a secondary, more subtle light. Remembering that surrounding objects/environments influence each other helps our scene feel grounded and add depth. For skin, the darker it is, the more this colour will be obvious. In light skin it's more subtle.

Even if there is no background for your subject, it's useful to still imagine the kind of environment they are in to achieve this in depth lighting. Are they beneath a sky that will cast some blue on the top facing planes? Is there a secondary light source? Taking a moment to question your subject's surroundings will do massively for making them feel grounded even when we cannot see it.

A digital oil style painting of Oliver, a young white man with brown hair, facial hair and round glasses. He holds one arm above his head and his other by his chest. He closes his eyes, looking peaceful. He is shirtless and has top surgery scars. He is hit with bright, warm light which casts blue shadows.

Finding the Light, digital, June 2024

Subsurface Scattering

I'm a fan of painting glowing light sources such as sunlight, and subsurface scattering plays a vital role. This is a shining light within a semi transparent surface. Skin in general has this effect when transitioning from light to shadow (terminators), but it's most prominent in fingers, the ears and nostrils. It's more noticeable in light skin, growing more subtle as skin tones darken, and will also appear in other creatures; think pointed ears or bat wings, where the skin is especially translucent. This can be applied further to fantasy creatures such as dragons to make them feel believable and realistic.

In light skin: think of those golden and strong red glows. In dark skin: think of the more saturated transitions you can spot in the skin, and deeper reds and copper colours.

You can create some lovely setups with subsurface scattering, and with it these glowing light scenes truly shine. I love to take advantage of them to achieve that glowing look. I also ensure my most saturated colours are given to these areas, but not everywhere, as that would ruin the appearance that these areas interact with light in such a way.

Raven from Fire Emblem is a young, muscular light-skinned man with spiky, layered red hair. He wears a blue tunic over white trousers, brown belts/boots and blue toned armour with gold embellishments. He stands with a sword raised above his head, light hitting him dramatically. Lucius, a young, slim feminine light-skinned man with long blond hair, knees next to him in blue robes with a beige sash holding onto his body. He glows in a heavenly light. A broken staff lies nearby. The background is a dark forest, light cast only on the pair.

Protecting the Light, digital, May 2026

Other textures

Making the most of textures in work can truly enhance lighting. Transparent materials and metal will often have a beautiful glow to them, and will cast a stronger bounce light onto surrounding objects. The former will often layer in a way where you can see the backlight shining through an object, with the light bouncing around it. You can place something with a wide range of values, like metal or silk, into a focal point. Remember that these materials are depicted to feel life-like from these values above all else; rendering metal to be very smooth won't necessarily make it look like metal, but having those crisp highlights certainly will. Metal in particular is something I love to exaggerate the highlights of. I enjoy making it glow and capture the light other areas might not necessarily reflect as much. Reflections in general will interact with the surrounding area and materials, allowing you to get natural hue and value variety.

I suggest having a look at what textures you enjoy the most in light and making the most of them. Sometimes, I like to make smaller studies involving a material, before committing to a bigger work. Another I love are strands of hair hit by a light above or behind, and tulle is wonderful for softness and layered light!

A loose soft pastel drawing of a long haired grey cat. It looks upwards, its face hit with a warm light that streams upwards, with long white whiskers. Golden light illuminates the chin.

Gazing Upwards, soft pastel on paper, March 2026

Finding your voice

My approach to lighting is not just technical. How I paint it is also based on how I see the world and my experiences. It's normal for eyesight to not be able to focus on everything at once (consider using more detail selectively because of this), but I have a particular inability to focus my eyes well, thus I cannot make shapes out in shadows as much nor look at light for long without great pain. 

I apply this to my art with lots of lost edges. This also links to how I like to capture how light makes me feel. It's beautiful and leaves me in awe, so I like to emphasise that in my work, and merge it with the lost edges to make the light feel like it's scattering. But I cannot look at it for long, so I want to paint it almost like it is fleeting, there to look and admire but also like a concept from a dream.

Think about how light makes you feel, and the story you'd like it to tell. Perhaps you like the story of light that washes out an area, where you cannot make out detail within it. This light could glow to be ethereal or could be more subtle to create mist or fog. Of course, you can change it up as well depending on the story you like to tell.

The same light source can create different moods depending on how you choose to depict it. Bright sunlight can be cheerful, warm and colourful. It can also be harsh, suffocating and exhausting. The dark can be frightening, lonely and unsettling. It can also be relaxing, peaceful and mysterious. Consider what elements in these scenarios you can focus on to bring out the type of mood you wish to convey.

An ethereal digital painting of Dolly Parton. She looks down with mostly closed eyes, with flowing, straightened volumised hair. She is painted with purple, glowing highlights and a mix of colours in the shadows.

Dolly Portrait, digital, August 2026

To Conclude

My lighting has grown due to fundamental practice in value, studying photos/masters, learning the physics of light/colour and experimentation—alternating between them has been key! I would always recommend bringing what you've learned in personal work and not only do studies. We cannot effectively know if we have learned something until we apply it. And when you do make study art, make sure you're making it intentionally. Don't just copy what you see—consider how form and value affect the light, why the colours shift as they do, direction. Take some time to learn how and why light and colour interact as they do. This is a massive subject that is well worth the study, and I hope this helps to show my pathway to having it be an identifiable feature in my work. I didn't want to give you a step-by-step guide on how to paint light here; I wanted to give you insights into how you can level up your light in general, and not just in one piece. I hope that is what this post has achieved!

My favourite resource is the Master Series Color and Light book published by 3D Total, which contained both information I had already researched and taught me many new things. There is so much information out there at your fingertips. Take your time and let curiosity guide you.

Embracing Joy and Hope, digital, March 2026