How do I draw night settings?

[DiscountedArtist]

I have an idea for a comic, but I'm not sure how I should draw my characters in the dark. Here's an example of what I want my comic to look similar to (look at the last panel):

[Rhonder]

Some options:

• if you work in a program that has layers and layer styles, you can play around with some of those. For example "multiply" and "overlay" layer styles have an effect such that they become transparent so you can see everything underneath, but change the colors that they overlap to be more like the color on the multiply/overlay layer. So in this case you would pick out a nighttime blue, color the whole panel in with that color on a separate layer, and play around with the layer styles. On the regular coloring layers you can either color your characters normally, or adjust their colors to look more night-ish too. On the multiply or overlay layer as well, don't be afraid to turn the opacity down if the effect is too strong. I use multiply for my standard shading, for example, and have gone from 100% all the time to like ~70-80% to soften the effect a bit.

• Simpler to execute, but harder to decide- you can just adjust your colors towards the blue end of the color spectrum and also adjusted to be a bit darker and just change the entire palette for those scenes. For example (in your example above) if you look at the char's head in the first panel it's white, but in the last panel it's actually a light blue, which makes it look like it's nighttime. You can do the same with other colors as well. Reds appear a little more purple at night, greens appear a little more blue-green, yellows appear a little more green, etc. Looking at lots of photos of nighttime scenes from real life will help give a sense of this. Here's a super quick example, but even these color picks aren't as good as they could be if I spent more time:

[joannekwan]

Old thread but still useful

[image] In today's update for my shoujo comic Life of an Aspie as pictured above, it takes place while its still dark out and since Susan and Mizuki's dorm room doesn't have a window to let any natural light in, its pretty dark as you may expect with the lights off. However, I had to re-upload this page twice today. First because the color was too bright for a dark scene and then because it was too dark for a dark scene. In the above image, I think (and I hope) I struck…

[Hazumirein]

The easiest option if you're working digitally and in color is pretty much just to create a new layer over top of everything else (except text/speech bubbles), set it to multiply, and dump in a dark blue or blue grey or whatever suits your fancy. Adjust hue and layer opacity until you get something that looks good.

Obviously you can get more advanced than that with it; sometimes I use multiple layers on different settings to get a certain tone. Honestly it's just something you need to play around with until you find something that works for you.

Sometimes a night sky and some moonlight can also help you out; here's some of my night-scene art:

This technique also works pretty well for other lighting scenarios; I used a some grey layers to desaturate and darken this scene for a rainy look:

[BlueDragon]

I think everyone's given good advice. I handled a night scene in my own comic by using varying shades of blue. The moon was out, so I used some lighter blues for highlights and such. I didn't do as good of a job as some of the other examples here, but I'll share how mine turned out XD

Sometimes you can "google" night hues and get some cool combinations and ideas

Not sure if it's what you're looking for in your comic. I think that last panel looks okay: I can tell you were making a night scene :3 But, I hope this helps.

I "spoilered" this because there is a curse word on the page...oops.

http://www.crystallotuschronicles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/A401.jpg