Dress up a simple doll with magic effects! Magical lights (or lights from the sun, overheading lighting, or a flashlight) should reflect on clothing, hair, and skin, as well as casting shadows in various colors.

The big trick is in understanding how light works. If you know what color light you have, you can figure out what color the shadow should be, and with special shading techniques in the GIMP (or another program, although you might have to use different tools), you can easily achieve impressive effects.

Because there is always a light source of some kind, you can frequently use this effect to give your dolls more depth, even if there aren't any magic effects or visible light sources.

Every article of clothing should be on a separate layer. The base and hair should also be separate layers. This is because different colors will take the lighting effects in different ways, so it's easier to keep them separate. Even if several pieces of clothing are the same color (in this example, they are all black!), if they are made of different fabrics they might reflect the light in different ways. A shinier material will show more highlights, for example.

The fire balls on my doll are a very simple effect. (This technique can easily be adapted to different shapes.)

Starting on a new layer, I choose the paintbrush tool. This is better than the pencil in this case because it allows soft edges.

I choose a large circular brush with fuzzy edges. As I proceed, I will use progressively smaller brushes.

I start with one dot of my light orange color. If that's too small, a slight circular motion will easily produce a larger circle.

Using smaller and smaller brushes, I add a series of brighter and more yellow circles at the center (or the brightest part) of my little fireball. The last touches should be almost white.

For this doll, I smudged my fireball and copied it a few times. Note that the doll lacks depth, and the bright fireballs hide the subdued shading.

This is where we start to get clever. The light emitted by my fireballs should be a sort of yellow-orange, so I use the dropper to select that color.

Pull up the Color Selection menu again, but this time go for the Triangle tab.

The color of your light source should already be selected. The color of the shadow is on the opposite side of the wheel. Armed with this knowledge, you can proceeed to use whatever coloring method you like, but there's an especially cool way to get this relationship automatically in the GIMP.

You'll need to select your shadow color (in this case, a blue).

With your shadow color selected, choose the paintbrush tool.

Go to the Tool Options dialog. Under Mode, choose Multiply (Burn). This is like using the regular burn tool, but instead of burning a nondescript and boring grey, you will get a nice blue (or whatever color you have selected).

When you are ready to add highlights, you will choose Divide (Dodge). This will automatically give you yellow-orange highlights! Whatever color you have selected, Divide (Dodge) will give you the opposite. You might want to try this to make sure you've got the right color.

Your primary tool will now be the Opacity slider. By moving it left and right, you can control the strength of the effect. You will also want to use various brush sizes.

I chose to start with the bodice. I have highlighted in bright yellow and blue to give you an idea where the shadows and highlights might go. Think about where the light is coming from—surfaces that face away from the light source will be in shadow. I generally do the shadows first.

In this case, because the light is so very bright and the surface is very dark, there are more shadows than highlights. I tend to use a large brush size with a low opacity in general and then I catch folds with a small brush and higher opacity.

Continue with each article of clothing, finishing with the hair and skin.

Here you can see that although the clothing is all black, some of it has brighter highlights because it is closer to the light source and made of a more reflective material. This is a great opportunity to really bring out folds in the fabric.

For a more typical doll, with only ambient lighting, the light source would probably be above and to one side, and the highlights would be less dramatic. You can often accomplish more with shadows than with highlights.

You should watch for fuzzy edges before you make the doll transparent. I tend to try to avoid having magic effects like these overlapping the region that should be transparent, since that tends to result in sloppy edges. If a little bit goes over, it can be erased.