Beyond Backgrounds : Making an Environment
By Kelly | May 24, 2007
When it comes to drawing environments for their characters, lots of artists lack confidence. Often, they’ll come up with a nice character drawing, only to throw in a poorly considered background painting, or even use a photo instead. Here’s my advice: planning is everything! Figure out your environment in advance, and you’ll have smooth sailing as the illustration progresses. Don’t let your characters dictate the composition, and don’t past in a sloppy last-minute background.
Here’s how I work:
1. Thumbnail Sketches
Wait, that’s not a drawing! The very first step- and one I highly recommend- is to do some research! I hiked around and found some nice looking rocks and trees for my environment. I’m not going to copy this photo exactly, it’s just inspiration for the shapes and colors I will use in my environment painting. Taking your own photos is best because there’s no copyright worries, but there’s always Google Image Search and Flickr if you need help finding more inspiration.
After looking through my reference photos, I start making thumbnail sketches. These tiny sketches are roughly the same proportion as my final image, only smaller. I experiment with different landscapes, as well as different placement and poses for the characters. Once I settle on a thumbnail composition, I clean it up a bit, and head over to the drawing board.
2. Final Sketch
It’s a big version of the thumbnail sketch, drawn in light blue col-erase pencil. I drew this large sketch freehand, but you can use your scanner and printer to scale up a thumbnail drawing. Print the sketch light blue, and you can draw directly over it. Or, print it grayscale and use a lightbox to trace it. I like to block out the rough composition using the light blue pencil, then ‘ink’ over it using a 2B mechanical pencil. I can get rid of the blue later, in Photoshop.
3. Cleanup and Cropping
Time for cleanup in Photoshop! Most image editing software will do, I just prefer to use Photoshop since it’s powerful,versatile, and generally stable. The image gets cropped, cutting off the unfinished edges. I use the hue/satuation tool (CTRL-U) to get rid of the blue sketch lines.
Setting Lightness to +100 for the Cyans, and doing the same for the Blue, makes the blue sketch lines disappear!
Once the blue lines are gone, it’s easy to use black and white brushes to clean up dust and linework where it’s needed.
4. Blocking in the Background
I set my sketch layer to Multiply mode, and start painting on a layer beneath. In this case I use earlier Roza illustrations as my color palette. When starting from scratch, I’ll pick a swatch and tweak the color using HSB sliders. If you learn nothing else from this tutorial, remember this: HSB is your friend!
Make sure you have the Color palette open- if you don’t see it, from the top bar choose Window > Color. Then, click on the upper right arrow and select HSB to set the Color palette mode. HSB stands for Hue, Saturation, and Black- or value. Modifying these settings as you paint is great way to create subtle color gradations, with a bit of color theory knowledge in advance. I select and paint in a base color, such as a nice leafy green for the trees. To paint the shadows on the tree, I adjust the Hue towards blue, and increase the Black. For the highlights, I adjust the Hue toward yellow, and lower the Saturation a bit. This is because natural light tends to be warm, and cool blues from the sky reflect into the shadows. If you follow the same pattern of HSB adjustments for every part of the environment, you can create a sense of a cohesion and shared light source.
5. Working the Foreground
With the magnetic lasso tool I select the foreground area so I can color it seperately. This tool is available if you select the lasso tool in Photoshop, and choose the bottom icon on the dropdown menu. To make my task easier, I create a layer mask by choosing at the top, Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal Selection. This preserves everything I paint inside the selection, and hides everything outside, without actually having to maintain the selection the whole time. Play around with layer masks, and you’ll see how useful they can be!
Also notice, I erased and lightened some of the lines in the background. Generally, farthest objects have the lightest lines, and nearest should be darkest. However, play around with this, you can bring attention to an area with dark line, or add atmosphere by fading lines selectively. Just do what works with the mood and atmosphere of the scene.
6. Integrating Characters
After finishing up the foreground painting, I make another layer for the character flat colors. Notice that the most saturated colors are in Roza and Nic, since they are the focal point of the illustration. Also, the highest contrast point is Roza’s light face against her dark hair. If I’d made really dark shadows around the rocks, they’d be competing for attention with Roza and Nic. Keeping the limited color and value in the environment shapes the viewer’s focus and makes for a stronger visual impact.
7. Final Touches
My final step is to add a light Multiply layer on top of the background, to darken the rocks and trees, add some depth, and really make the spotlight shine on the characters. I bring back the highlights on the rocks by erasing parts of the multiply layer.
Voila!
Remember, next time you’re in the mood to give your characters some background art:
1. Research!
2. Thumbnail sketches and composition studies
3. Plan the final image
4. Colors
5. Characters
Invest the time in researching and planning your pictures, and the results are guaranteed to be better than a pasted-in background.
Happy Drawing! 
Topics: Digital tutorials, Drawing tutorials | 25 Comments »
25 Responses to “Beyond Backgrounds : Making an Environment”
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August 15th, 2007 at 11:27 am
this is really incredible!!! thanks for the help!!
August 7th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Very nice tutorials.
Do you have any tutorials on drawing with the program Gimp?
June 29th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Hmmmmmm… That is really good…
I think I can improve my future artwork on
my site with those tutorials. Thanks for the
information that can help even a small-timer
like me!
June 21st, 2007 at 12:24 am
Emily- I used Photoshop for this. You can get a lot of the same effects using other software, but the shortcut keys and names will be somewhat different.
June 20th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
This was very helpful to me. Not only did you explain what to do, but you gave some insight as to why it was done. I really appreciate this!
June 20th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
What program did you use? Was it Paint Shop Pro, Adobe, or…?
June 9th, 2007 at 5:03 am
Ohhh good and useful, what else can i ask for?!!^^
June 8th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Wow, these are terrific. Thank you very much :D
May 27th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Umm…wow. Cool. Thanks for the tut! I found the stuff on saturation, masks, and shared light sources especially helpful!
May 25th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Vey cool! I can’t wait to try this! Thanks and keep up the awesome tutorials!