✍️ Sketch Along #9: Drawing Light & Shadow

VIP sketch-along #9 is happening today at 7pm UK time. Other details below. Remember, our sketch-alongs happen every Thursday!

✏️ I always mean to send these sketch-along notices out earlier in the week! But time goes by so fast that it already Thursday again. How does that happen??

Here’s some sketches from last week’s sketch-along. We sketches some cooooool grandparents✏️

✏️What are we drawing?

This week we are drawing…

Light and Shadow! Mood lighting, ambiance, atmosphere: interesting lighting can really elevate your children’s book illustrations and tell a story.

I’ve always had trouble adding dramatic lighting to my work but I LOVE when I see other illustrators accomplish it well. *Cough, Briony May Smith, cough*. But it can be a hard skill to learn. So that’s why today we’re sitting down and honing our light and shadow drawing skills so that if we want to add some dramatic lighting to our illustrations, we know how to!

✏️Drawing references?

We’ll be referencing from…

MOVIES! Oh yes, we’re doing this again. Screenshots from dramatically lit films are my go-to for referencing lighting. This isn’t just limited to Hitchcock and Spielberg. Animated films are a great place to pull references from as well!

Screenshot from Toy Story 3 (2010). Does anyone remember this intensely dramatic incinerator scene? Talk about lighting!

Make sure to bring along your light and dark drawing art supplies. I’m bringing my oil pastels and maybe some ink and brushes? We’ll see!

I’ll add the references and reference sources to the Discord sketch-along channel so you can continue practicing before and after our meetup. If you haven’t joined the now bustling TIAC Discord group, please sign up using the link at the bottom of this email.

✏️When and what time?

We’ll all be chatting and sketching today: April 24th, 2025!

Our weekly sketch-alongs take place at 7pm UK time and 2pm EST. Click here to access a time zone converter to convert the time to your time zone.

Can’t make it? No worries! Our sketch-alongs are uploaded to The Illustrator’s Art Club VIP substack archive for you to view at your leisure👍

It’s an hour-long sketching party and part-casual-hangout/part-fun-drawing tutorial.

We’ll be chatting about:

• How to portray different types of light and shadow in your illustration.

• How lighting an illustration can affect the mood of your drawing.

• Learning how to come up with different lighting situations from your own imagination.

• And whatever else we can fit in an hour!

  

  Illustration by me (2019). My favorite kind of lighting… the unexpected kind!

✏️ And where are we drawing??

On Zoom! Here’s the link: