How to Draw Lightning

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French at jayfrenchstudios.com. I'm going to show you how to draw lightning today. All right, we'll start by showing the general shape of lightning, which of course is completely imprecise, and unpredictable, but, obviously, if you're going for realism, you don't want lightning that looks like the chest on Captain Marvel, you want more realism, you want the random look of an ark of electricity. And the best way to capture that is just to let your hand go, you'll get some sharper, tighter points, you'll get some broader, longer lines, lightning generally will fork, not always. Sometimes you just get one fork. It's completely unpredictable. Most of the time you'll get multiple forks. Now, lightning is actually light, so the neat way to do lightning is to get a dark area, this is assuming perhaps that you've already drawn a scene, and got a night sky, or even a day sky, although lightning only tends to happen in the day, it tends to be darkish. So here's where you can actually use the other end of your pencil for more than just correcting mistakes. In this case, the thinner the eraser the better. You have more control. This is thin enough for what we're going to - just to show you. Use your eraser the same way you would as if you were drawing. Again, especially with lightning, it's easy to pull this off, because it doesn't have a right, a correct shape, a correct look. It's random, it's unpredictable. Now if you want you can go through after you've done this, and define the edges or you can leave it just as the impression. If you're working in color, a good thing to remember is that generally lightning is actually more blue than yellow, although sometimes it does appear yellow, it's all about how it affects the light. You want the center to be white, do your color, let's say that, let's show this with some thickness, just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Have your color radiate out from the bolt, because you want your center to remain white. Still have this inside edge soft just slightly, but have that much more of a glow, because if you look at photos of lightning you will see that the inside of it is pretty much so bright that it's white. And that's a good idea for getting started with drawing lightning."