Experimenting with different ways of creating a glow effect in Procreate...

 

Seeing as I use Procreate a lot for my design work I thought it would be a good idea to see what kind of results I could create as far as making glow effects are concerned, having come up with some pleasing work in After Effects I wanted to compare the two programs. 

At this point I wasn't too concerned with lighting the whole image, I just wanted to continue experimenting with making the blade glow. Above is my first attempt, here I simply added a layer below the blade and used the medium nozzle spray paint brush and then dropped the opacity down to 75%. This was ok but not as visually pleasing as the After Effects output and looked more like a haze or mist than a glow.

Next I found a tutorial on a YouTube channel called Muzenik Art showing the process of creating an initial shape then duplicating the layer and on this layer selecting the Gaussian Blur option in the adjustments box, then changing the layer type from Normal to Add and duplicating again before playing around with the Hue and Saturation. I continued with the spray paint for this second attempt. Below is an example of just duplicating the original layer once and using the Gaussian Blur...

 

I quite liked the texture of the edges even though it wasn't what I'd originally set out to do, sticking with this for now below is what happened when I duplicated the second layer...

This was quite exciting and I really liked the way the white added to the intensity of the glow. However I didn't realise until later on that I hadn't been using the Gaussian Blur tool to it's full affect. I didn't realise you could slide the apple pencil from left to right to enhance the blur, by this point I'd started experimenting with the Script brush instead of the Spray paint but this was what I came up with when I drew a basic shape around the edge of the blade using the Script brush, then duplicated this and selected the Gaussian Blur, sliding the pencil from left to right and then changing the layer type to Add. I then duplicated this layer as well and enlarged it slightly...

This reminded me a bit of the effects used in the old 80/90's Ghostbusters cartoon and colour-wise and edge-wise was closer to what I'd been aiming for. Before I got to this point though I'd tried a number of other methods that had created equally interesting results. The first was using a combination of the Script brush and a Perspective Blur. I drew a shape around the edge of the blade and then selected the Perspective Blur and used the slide option to enhance it, this was the result...

The fill wasn't as electric as the previous attempts but I really liked the blurred edges, so I thought I'd try duplicating this and also changing the layer type to Add. This was the result...

Again the addition of some white on the interior of the fill really helped make it zing. Now that I'd discovered a way to blur the edges I thought I'd change the colour slightly to a shade of blue a bit closer to the one I used in After Effects and try a thinner glow. This was the result...

This was interesting but not as powerful as the previous versions. Having found these new blur options (the Gaussian Blur and Perspective Blur) I wanted to try the other one which was a Motion Blur. So, once again I changed the colour slightly and then drew around the edge of the blade on a new layer. Then selected Motion Blur but this time through playing around I found out that you could create different types of blur depending on the direction you slid the pencil for example, in the image below I slid the pencil from the top of the screen downwards and the blur is vertical...

I then tried again however this time I slid in a diagonal direction, this was the result...

I then went again and from left to right...

Though these aren't as strong as the first tests they were really giving me ideas for how they could be used in other ways. I tried another two outputs using the one above as a starting point and duplicating and changing the layer type once again to Add. Here was the first one...

This colour was a lot more vibrant so I repeated the process and duplicated the layer and changed it to Add and enlarged both duplicated layers...

This has been a really insightful and enjoyable experiment, the next thing I'd like to do is figure out how to animate this but I think when it comes to motion After Effects will probably be the better bet. But for still imagery and illustration this has been a great discovery and I'll definitely be using some of these techniques in the final stages of my character design work this semester.