Trouble drawing night scenes

[Bobadventures]

I have a lot of trouble balancing positive and negative space when I draw night scenes.

I do a black and white comic. I don't use gray tones because I know that I would not consistently have time to apply them, and therefore I don't want to establish a precedent of having them. I do occasionally use hatching and cross-hatching, but I haven't used them much up to now.

I think my problem mostly comes down to the right balance of line thickness and shadows. It drives me nuts trying to get it all to look good, and I'm rarely satisfied with my results. Making the starfields attractive is hard, too.

Any advice? For that matter, does anyone else have these problems?

[Webkilla]

Well, you wanna do a night scene... in a black and white comic... and you dont use shading

there's your problem!

add shades - lots of them?

[Lisket]

Sin City?

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Mayhaps you could share an example of your attempts? I think I'd have trouble putting any advice into words without a visual of how you're already doing.

[VinnieD]

Sin City?

This is actually on the right track. Go look up some hardboiled style comics and study the way it was done in the past. Check out some Dick Tracy, The Spirit and other things of that nature and look how it was done by the old masters. For a great reference book check the comics section of your local book store for "The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics." There's a ton of stuff tracing the genre and its distinctive style from the 30's to today. It should help you get a feel for what goes where and how to use black and white, where to use solids, hatching, and white space.

[Bobadventures]

Sin City?

This is actually on the right track. Go look up some hardboiled style comics and study the way it was done in the past. Check out some Dick Tracy, The Spirit and other things of that nature and look how it was done by the old masters. For a great reference book check the comics section of your local book store for "The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics." There's a ton of stuff tracing the genre and its distinctive style from the 30's to today. It should help you get a feel for what goes where and how to use black and white, where to use solids, hatching, and white space.

Good advice! I went and pulled out my big Dick Tracy anthology and leafed through. Gould was one of the great graphic design cartoonists, and he used no halftones and only minimal crosshatching. It looks like one trick he did was to mainly lay his characters against the landscape, not the black sky, and also to use black silhouette for large sections of the buildings on the ground. The sky doesn't take up much panel space, and he doesn't draw stars. He also periodically inverts the image, so the characters and groundplane are in black silhouette against a white background. I'll have to study it some more.

Mayhaps you could share an example of your attempts? I think I'd have trouble putting any advice into words without a visual of how you're already doing.

Sure. Here's the one that was frustrating me when I wrote that post:
http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com/d/20090818.html

And here's a long stretch of night shots (which I wasn't happy with), from several months ago:
Starting here (I'm actually happy with the first strip of this sequence):
http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com/d/20090428.html

And ending here:
http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com/d/20090815.html

[McDuffies]

I also reccomend checking out Spirit, Eisner was one of the earliest masters of manipulation of light sources. As for Sin City, while it's use of black/white contrast is often great, I think that it's too individual vision to actually be used as teaching tool. Ie if you learn from Eisner, you'll learn how to use b/w contrast; if you learn from Miller, you'll learn how to use b/w contrast like miller does.

Other than that I think that the key to drawing night scenes is not to overdo it. Scenes where entire sky is blacked out or hatched, I think, often appear too heavy handed. The trick is to imply night with various hints. Like, at night, light is more directed and less dispersed. Therefore shadows will be heavier, thicker, with sharper edges, and every object will cast a shadow.
Consider light sources: at day, the main light source will be the sun, and there is plenty of auxiliary sources; at night it will probably be a single street light, a light coming from out of the window, lamp, individual sources. By establishing these light sources, you'll naturally come to more distinctly night shadows dropped under different angles, and darker corners.

I heard that you can make decent night sky with an old toothbrush. After you've blacked out the sky, put some white ink or tempera on the toothbrush and by flicking toothbrush with your finger disperse drops of white ink over the night sky. You'll have to cover the rest of the page with some paper first.

[Bobadventures]

I also reccomend checking out Spirit, Eisner was one of the earliest masters of manipulation of light sources. As for Sin City, while it's use of black/white contrast is often great, I think that it's too individual vision to actually be used as teaching tool. Ie if you learn from Eisner, you'll learn how to use b/w contrast; if you learn from Miller, you'll learn how to use b/w contrast like miller does.

Other than that I think that the key to drawing night scenes is not to overdo it. Scenes where entire sky is blacked out or hatched, I think, often appear too heavy handed. The trick is to imply night with various hints. Like, at night, light is more directed and less dispersed. Therefore shadows will be heavier, thicker, with sharper edges, and every object will cast a shadow.
Consider light sources: at day, the main light source will be the sun, and there is plenty of auxiliary sources; at night it will probably be a single street light, a light coming from out of the window, lamp, individual sources. By establishing these light sources, you'll naturally come to more distinctly night shadows dropped under different angles, and darker corners.

I heard that you can make decent night sky with an old toothbrush. After you've blacked out the sky, put some white ink or tempera on the toothbrush and by flicking toothbrush with your finger disperse drops of white ink over the night sky. You'll have to cover the rest of the page with some paper first.

Good advice! I went ahead and put heavy shadows in today's comic, and I think it was a big help. I'm still not entirely satisfied with it, but I think it's a significant improvement over the way I'd been doing it. The strip won't have another night scene for a while, but I'll see what I can do when it next comes up, perhaps hatching the sky. Actually, I'll be doing some scenes in space before too long, which will present similar but subtly different problems.