A common light source for nighttime scenes is the light filtering through windows, as seen from outside. Often the quality of light is warm and soft, from multiple light sources or even the light of one lamp bouncing around the white walls of a room before it makes its way outside. The escaping light may have a slight corona if you want it to feel especially glowy. Light exiting a door or window on the ground level may hit street level objects and you may see the light hitting the ground. Are the edges of that light hard or soft? Perhaps they are more defined closer to the window and fuzzy as the light scatters farther from its source?

Notice that night scenes often contain multiple light sources. You can have the setting sun, a neon sign, glowing windows, and car headlights all in one view.

Multiple light sources may appear in daytime scenes, too, (below) especially in indoor scenes with light coming in from the windows. We have to consider the color of the light coming in from the windows, treat each window as its own light source, and consider the color of any light sources inside as well. With multiple light sources, we can also have multiple shadows from a single object.

“This is not a church, it is the town hall in Basel, it is a cathedral of democracy. The house’s wonderful construction is a red castle from 1500, it is so superb. There is so much to see, murals, statues and stonemasonry that I observed several times before I started to paint. The light inside of the castle wall is fundamentally different to the nearly Mediterranean light outside of the building. The specialty about this is, that it is so dark inside of the inner courtyard, that the powerful colors of the building only start to glow when there is a sun ray kissing the walls.” —Tine Klein

You may notice when painting after sunset that the sky is often not the darkest part of your view. Intuitively we want to drop a black sky into a night scene, but in many situations, this is contrary to what we see in front of us. Especially in big cities, light pollution can keep the sky lighter, while light sources closer to us can cast dark shadows. Pay attention to the color of the sky—maybe it is purple, or navy, or gray! What in your view touches the sky? Check for value; see if the edges of trees or buildings appear darker or lighter than the sky itself. Streetlights may be offering ambient lighting to the ground level of buildings, while the tops remain dark against a lighter sky. The lighting itself can sell a sketch as being a night view: the light pouring out from a store front, a darkened building façade. Simply putting a black sky into a sketch done during the day will likely still not read as nighttime.

Night sketches tend to be darker overall, which can be hard to get used to. It may mean the lightest parts of a sketch get darker than usual to keep the sketch cohesive.

Oftentimes, our light source is the sun, or a lamp attached to a wall or ceiling. Streetlights are a fun but unusual light source, since we can see how they are affecting objects a full 360 degrees around them. They can cast a wide radius, hitting not only the street and walking paths they are meant to illuminate, but also surrounding trees, people, and buildings.

Neon offers a very specific challenge: it can be the brightest light in a view, but often that light is a very high chroma color. To get a high chroma red, for example, this usually means we want to use a pigment at full strength. The problem with doing this with neon is that the neon can appear much darker than it should be since a high chroma red is also dark in value. Suddenly, the values in the sketch are thrown off and instead of having the desired glow, the neon becomes harder to see. By paying attention to the balance of color and value, we can combat this in a few ways.

• • It’s all relative! Make the surroundings darker so the neon is lighter by comparison.
• • Leave the neon itself white (or, add the white back in with gouache or white gel pen) and make the glow around the light the appropriate color.
• • Add the color of the neon to surfaces being hit by the light, while leaving the light itself a bright white. It gives the viewer the impression that the light coming off the white object is that color. You can make an artistic decision on how much of that color to include, if you want to portray it as a huge, all-encompassing glow, or if the light only touches the closest objects.

Lighting at a concert or sporting event can require a combination of techniques. The lighting may be bright white stadium lights, or bold, colorful theatrical lighting. We can use some of the same principals used for night sketching in these instances, but always want to start by locating where the light is coming from. We may see multiple light sources, with other parts of the scene falling into relative darkness. Often, we will observe one central area being lit.