Want to Improve Your Art? Start with Light.

Few skills are more important to an artist than mastering the relationship between light and shadow. With proper lighting, a two-dimensional drawing can pop off the page and take on a vivid, three-dimensional feel. Whether you're painting a portrait, illustrating a still life, or sketching a cityscape, your understanding of lighting can make or break the realism and emotion in your work.

But while it's one of the most critical artistic tools, lighting is also one of the hardest to get right.

That’s why Light Reference was created. This free online app allows visual artists to build scenes, adjust lighting direction and strength, and use the result as a visual reference for studying how light and shadow affect form.

Whether you’re a painter, illustrator, or digital artist, Light Reference gives you an intuitive way to experiment with mood, depth, and form, all without the need to set up physical lighting in real life.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through what Light Reference is, how to use it, what features are coming soon, and why it’s a tool you’ll want to bookmark it to return again and again.

What Is Light Reference?

Light Reference is a free, easy-to-use web application created by Queue Development with beginners in mind. It helps 2D artists understand how light interacts with form in a variety of scenarios by using simple, adjustable shapes.

With Light Reference, you can:

- Add or remove multiple simple shapes (sphere, cube, cylinder)

- Adjust the direction and strength of a single light source

- Move and rotate objects along X, Y, and Z axes

- Change object colors

- Toggle a background grid on or off

- Save your configuration as a downloadable PNG for reference

How to Use Light Reference

Step 1: Choose Your Shape(s)

Add up to five spheres, cubes, or cylinders to your scene.

- Spheres are useful for studying how light behaves on rounded forms like heads, fruits, or balls.

- Cubes work well for boxes, buildings, or any scene with hard edges and flat planes.

- Cylinders help replicate arms, legs, cups, and architectural columns.

These three shapes provide the foundation for practicing realistic shading and understanding how light behaves across surfaces.

Step 2: Position and Color Your Shapes

Move each object freely along the X, Y, or Z axes to create a custom composition. You can also change each shape’s color. This is great for exploring how shadows fall between objects and how reflected light affects color and tone.

Step 3: Adjust the Lighting

Use the bottom slider panel to control:

- Azimuth — the horizontal direction of the light source

- Elevation — the vertical height of the light

- Intensity — how bright or dim the light appears

These settings let you explore how light behaves in different situations, from overhead light to early morning light, evening light, and everything in between.

Step 4: Toggle the Grid

The optional X-plane grid helps you keep track of perspective. Once your scene is set, you can toggle it off for a cleaner reference image.

Step 5: Download Your Scene

When you’re satisfied with the setup, click “Download PNG” to save the image to your device. You can then use it as a reference for sketching, shading practice, or building more complex scenes later.

How Is Light Reference Improving?

User feedback is helping shape the next version of Light Reference. New features currently in development include:

- More Shapes – cones, pyramids, and compound forms

- Material Options – shiny, metallic, or matte surfaces

- Colored Lighting – simulate warm, cool, or tinted light

- Multiple Light Sources – simulate complex lighting environments

- Rotation Controls – rotate objects to achieve alternate perspective views

- Scene Presets – save and reuse lighting configurations

- Dark Mode – a low-light UI for night sessions

- Mobile Optimization – better controls for tablets and phones

Have ideas for new features? We'd love to hear them! Contact us at [email protected]. Your input directly shapes the future of this tool.

Why Use Light Reference?

Mastering lighting and shading is one of the fastest ways to level up your art. Light Reference gives you a quick, visual way to build that skill, without needing physical lights, props, or ideal daylight conditions.

It’s perfect for:

- Studying the fundamentals of light and shadow

- Practicing tonal shading

- Creating lighting references for thumbnails or compositions

- Building consistent lighting in character and environment design

Just log on, build your scene, and start learning.

Try It Out!

Visit Light Reference today and see how fast you can build your lighting intuition. Whether you’re brand new or refining your style, this free tool is here to help you grow.

Happy sketching!

If you run an e-commerce site in Michigan, there’s an ugly truth that not many of us are ready to face. How exciting your product is, is less important than how your customer feels buying it.

There. I said it.

When it comes to sales, there’s a reason certain salesmen and women excel while others don’t. Some know how to sell the experience. Buying a car wouldn’t be nearly as enticing without a test drive. Fine dining restaurants serve quality food, sure, but they’re also selling atmosphere and emotion. We love our coney islands here in Michigan, but I’d never buy a $150 steak at one, even if the waitress promised it was Wagyu. The same principle applies to online checkouts — your customer’s experience sets the tone for their visit. It may determine how much they spend, if they spend, and whether they’ll be back.

Maybe you can think of a time when you searched through a website, you found exactly what you wanted, but you didn’t trust the site – or maybe they added steps to the process that made buying more of a hassle than a joy. There’s a saying that comes to mind, “don’t make it hard for me to pay you.”

In the age of the internet and online shopping, the worst thing you can be is out of date. A clunky website can be a source of frustration, make you look out of touch, raise questions whether your site is safe, and worst of all, it can make them leave a full cart sitting at your virtual register.

Your customer’s experience on your website matters from the moment they find your link to the moment they submit their payment. But according to data from the Baymard Institute, a whopping 70% of online sales in 2024 ended with customers abandoning their cart. According to the institute’s 14-year study, there are several common pitfalls that end online sales that could have otherwise been money in your bank account.

Here are some of the worst offenders:

Customers were required to make an account to proceed to checkout (26% abandonment)

The website didn’t seem trustworthy (25% abandonment)

The checkout process was too cumbersome to finish (22% abandonment)

Even something as simple as requiring a phone number but not explaining why or how it will be used can influence a customer’s decision to leave a site and was studied to cost businesses up to 5% of sales.

A simple and easy checkout experience, with the option to pay as a guest, with a payment method they prefer, is how the most successful online retailers boost their business. The trouble is, keeping it simple, isn’t always as simple, or intuitive as it may sound.

If you want to get more customers to check out, we can recommend several quick ways to improve your customer’s experience based on Baymard’s findings.

1.  Allow Guest Checkout

Make it clear that customers are allowed to “continue as guest” at checkout. Don’t hide the fact that a customer is able to use your site without completely registering. In a perfect world for a business, we’d love everyone to enthusiastically sign up for emails, promotions, and the promise of return business, but the harsh reality is, not every customer wants to. A customer having a comfortable experience on their terms means they’re more likely to follow through at checkout and may still generate repeat business.

2.  Simplify Password Requirements

You may think you’re looking out for your customers by setting an array of requirements for their password — but the more stringent your requirements are, the more likely a customer will turn elsewhere to shop in the future if they forget their password. Nearly 19% of would-be repeat customers abandon their cart instead of resetting a forgotten password.

Most people set their own strategies for password protection. They’ve created a system to commit passwords to memory while feeling secure and are less likely to recall an outlying password with requirements they were forced to meet. To offer better recallability, while still providing protection, sites can take several actions.

a. Allow six- or eight-character minimum passwords without additional requirements regarding special or case-sensitive characters.

b. Create password attempt limitations or obstacles and incorporate human-friendly CAPTCHAs, and/or

c. Implement two-factor authentication using a customer’s pre-registered phone number or email address, and

d. Require re-input of payment details for orders going to a new address.

3.  Provide Multiple Payment Options

Customers like what they like. This is true from the item in their cart to the way they choose to pay. E-commerce sites can easily increase sales by offering multiple payment options beyond standard debit/credit card transactions. PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay capture the lion’s share of online market transactions — about 85%. Sites without these payment options are at high risk of losing the final sale to another site which doesn’t require a customer to fish out their card to find the numbers.

4.  Be Clear About Delivery

Customers visit sites to shop, not to do math. If they’ve gone so far as to place your item in their cart, they want to know when they can have it, not how long it will take to ship. While these may seem like one-in-the-same to the business owner, to a customer, “typically ships between 2-3 business days” and “arrives by Thursday” may as well be two different languages. The same goes for “orders placed by 3 p.m. EST” versus “order in the next two hours.”

The former in both examples above are how businesses speak to other businesses, but customers are more likely to enjoy the latter. The people who want to buy your products want to know when they should expect their package and when they need to place the order to get it on time. Offering order cut offs and latest expected delivery dates are a way you can improve the user experience by simply speaking their language.

5.  Clarify Required Fields

Be clear about what’s required and what is not, and avoid input masks for restricted inputs. You need to know what to put on the shipping label and you need a method to contact the customer should there be a change with their delivery. However, customers can become confused if it’s not clear which information you’re asking for is optional or mandatory. It’s best to denote both instances clearly on the checkout page, either by directly stating what is “required” or “optional,” or by utilizing asterisks for mandatory fields.

Customers can also become frustrated if the information they provide is flagged as being “invalid.” If your site requires dashes in phone numbers, or if spacing doesn’t matter, it’s best practice to provide an example for the expected formatting to reduce confusion and customer fatigue.

6.  Clearly Explain Formatting Errors

Another cart-abandoning point of contention for many customers is frustration from unclear error messages. Some users will try again, but persistent error messages without clear instructions on how to correct the issue will lead many customers to lose patience. They may even begin to believe the issue is with your site, not with themselves. You only get so many attempts before a customer loses hope and leaves their cart and your site behind — potentially forever.

If a credit card has been input incorrectly or the customer has incorrectly filled another field, don’t just send them back to the top of the page, provide clear messaging that explains exactly what is wrong and how to fix it.

Implementing these solutions can provide immediate benefits to your business, whether your sales are primarily in Michigan, or you’re searching for customers around the globe. Keeping customers engaged, happy and undisturbed throughout the entire sale means fewer abandoned carts and more money coming in. Good luck!  Test