I feel like even the basic ones don't look as good as basic backgrounds from other people. Can someone give me some advice? Should I try using thinner lines? Or different colors or what?
Oct '19
Oct '19
Lack of drop shadow, I think. Some things are probably shaded, a lot aren't and it breaks the illusion of things in a 3D space. For example, the TV casts a shadow in the wall but the bottles don't cast anything on the table, the room's furniture casts a shadow but the PC, books and chair look like stickers, and the lack of shadows in the chairs and behind the bottles(that gray part) in the last one only makes it more apparent how they were copy and pasted. The style is good, it just needs to keep up that illusion on things that draw even the littlest bit of attention.
In the first one, not much can be seen so I can't say much about it. The bottles in the counter don't have shadows though so that would probably help.
The second one I think looks pretty good too. I can see some lines seem a little off, but it looks more stylistic than a mistake.
The third one is definitely the most funky of the three. You can tell the perspective is off and it doesn't look like it's because of the style. The bar stools line up weirdly.
I just did this quick overlay:
right now they look pretty flat--which isn't a bad stylistic approach, and it has a cubist feel to it, if you want to go that route. But, if you're looking to make them more interesting and realistic, I'd try some perspective and some atmospheric perspective as well. You already know what perspective is and what that means, and right now your bg is so stylistic maybe you purposely didn't do a perspective to a ruler so that's up to you if you want to change that. But, you can also exaggerate that perspective by having thinner lines and less detail the farther from the camera the objects are.
For atmospheric perspective, it's mostly about colors--colors of the lines as well as the colors of the objects. The farther away an object is, the less warmer tones it has, and the colors are lighter and lighter as objects go farther from the foreground. There's different opinions on the order that colors taper off, but you can generally say that reds are only very up close. Then yellows are next to fade. Then greens, and finally blues and grey purpley hues, until everything very far away is shades of gray. And this still applies indoors somewhat (although not as much as an outdoor scene)--it helps create a feeling of distance.
Something that might be fun to play with is this Bob Ross technique--he starts with the background first and goes to foreground last (which is the traditional way of coloring a painting) And he puts a gradation for each layer of objects, so the tops of his mountains are a dark color, and it fades to a light color near the base--which looks like a mix of fog and bounced light. It gives a really good illusion that something is far away. And, the more that you stack this gradation of things on top of eachother, the more feeling of space you get.
You can do the same thing in an indoor scene with gradations on objects--maybe not as intensely as an outdoor scene, but enough so the tops of the objects are a slightly darker color than the bottoms. I don't know if I'm explaining this well so if you want me to do a drawover, just let me know.
But honestly I wouldn't say your backgrounds are bad. They just blend in quite a bit with the foreground so they all seem like they're on one plane.
OK, I'll do one with this green room here--and like I'm just a person on the internet so you can feel free to ignore all of this, it's just how I would go about it.
So like I'm just going over your final file so I'm gonna be a little messy, but I decided to bring interest to the front with the brighter and warmer green tone, and let it gradate back into a cooler gray like you had originally. And, I did it to the bar as well so you'd get a sense that the bar is close to us, but not as close as the floor. The bottles were nicely drawn, and I liked their colors (in fact their colors became the floor color) but they had a lot of detail and contrast because it's the darkest and the most saturated colors together--so I toned it way down so the focus wouldn't stop at the bottles, since I assumed this was part of a larger image and you'd want your people to be the focal point. (and some highlights on a a bunch of the bottles would be fun, since they're made of glass, but I didn't do that) And TBH I could probably make that whole bottle section a little lighter as it fades into the back, but that's just an afterthought and I'm not entirely sure what the angle of the bottles should be in regards to the counter.
Also, the light comes from above--not sure which direction it's coming from, and so I plopped some shadows on the chairs, and added some lighting to the top of the chairs. The chair closest to us, with the brightest lighting. The corner walls and the ceiling should also be different colors where they meet--so I made the ceiling dark, and the back wall slightly lighter than the side to give more of an illusion that they're meeting at a corner.
Anyway this was just something done really fast, but hopefully made it make sense?
And like I don't know what the vibe of the original painting was, so maybe green was the wrong color but you can do the same with different shades of gray if you want to keep it more gray.
But one of the big things I noticed going through these is I really don't know where your source of light was, so I didn't do much shadows. So that might help if there was more clarity in the lighting for your future backgrounds.
Either one works really. To follow the other objects hard shadow work fine too, or very soft just so it shows that it's a solid object casing shadow. It's like when you add a thin line to show a light source reflecting on an object, suddenly everything clicks into place when before it didn't feel right, as tiny as the light/shadow may be.
The tips here are very helpful and I do agree with them, but I also want to point out something that would give you more direction when you start coloring your comic (also sorry for the crappy look, I did them quite quickly):
I felt this one was giving too much focus on the bottles, stools, and counter:
I also believe you wanted to focus on the characters due to the light you added on them, so I covered the background with a dark color using a soft brush
On this one I felt like the wood elements and the blue rug were quite distracting to my eyes, and the wall next to the hand on the right side kinda blends with the coat for having almost the same tone:
So I added a purple-ish filter and a soft shadow on the distractions and changed a tiny bit of the tones to make it warmer while everything around is cold. Now the hand on the right side can be seen more clearly, if you want, you can also change the tone to contrast more with the purple background 
Also I’m no expert in coloring, and I learned this technique following “Color with Kurt2” video tutorials
I think you have a pretty cool flat style. Soo...either go with a distorted/graphic perspective or go with real perspective. You might consider not outline the background, only your figures.
I'd even go a step further by not drawing the label details on the bottles, and just hint at their shapes. Only vaguely outline the top and bottom for some that are grouped together. You need to know that they're there, but you don't need to know what they are. Techniques like that can allow for scenes where you might not want the strong focus lighting, without distracting eyes away from the focal subject matter. Or used in conjunction with it.
Something that could bring more life to the bar is not filling every single shelf with a bottle covering every square inch of space too. Maybe make some empty spaces, or find some other types of items to sparringly exist on the shelf. Add "signs of life" around the rest of the bar, like maybe an ashtray, those little placemats for glasses idk what they're called. It would help take the eyes away from the shelf which is jam packed with objects, vs a half cut off person on the right. Placing some elements in between the two might help make a subtle draw to the people as well as provide some atmosphere.
