Illustrating a light spell

The biggest risk when illustrating a light spell is overdoing it by going nuts with the Color Dodge tool and putting glowing highlights everywhere! Remember that light doesn’t always reveal more details – it can also obscure things. Especially in a dungeon basement with high humidity, the light particles between the characters and the camera would blur things together. So instead of adding a yellow-ish radial gradient on a Vivid Light blend mode or such, we choose a Normal layer on a low Opacity. This approach evens out lights and shadows on the characters and gives us more depth. In the end, depth is more important than detail.