Need help with my background drawings

[Cloverloy]

Hello!
So I'm currently drawing a comic which is set in a fantasy world that has a lot of nice scenery that I want to show.
I'm a huge fan of good backgrounds and landscape drawings, so using 3D backgrounds is not an option for me.

At the moment my backgrounds look like this:

I sketch them, then make vanishing points by hand to get the perspective right, line them and colour them.
This takes up a loooot of time and I think this method is better suited for interior backgrounds, not outside scenery.

What I am aiming for, is to be able to draw backgrounds like this:

I am obviously very far from that but everyone has to start somewhere, right?

My problem is that I don't really know how to approach it (It always turns out looking terrible when I try myself on it)
Another problem is that I only have Paint tool Sai, so I can't use a lot of brushes these people use in their videos : /

Any help, tips or tutorials would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[nekhcore]

I can't help much since I don't paint, but I'm pretty sure you having SAI has nothing to do with anything since you can create and import custom brushes.

[punkarsenic]

coooooooooooontraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast

laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayeeeeeeeeeeers

your backgrounds are really nice, but currently they look like 3D CAD drawings without the final finish. so your things arent overly flat in their contour, but the lack of shadows and lightness of those that exist, the stark midday lighting, takes away from the mood.
the great thing about the concept art youre drawing inspiration from, in part, is its concentrated and directional lighting. the light areas are light, the dark areas are very dark. also, theres an overall colour tint that comes with light - photographers prefer to shoot in the early morning and late evening, the "golden hour" because the colour temperature of the light is lower, more golden, and gives things greater richness.
In that last image you shared, the palette is overwhelmingly green with a little blue, not exactly because the light is, but because of reflections from the grass and the sky, and it gives a greater sense of place (and time and temperature) as well as making an altogether more appealing image

so, consider the direction of and nature of your light - the longer the shadows and more concentrated the point of light (hence greater contrast) the more dramatic it is, and light guides the eye. you want the focal point of your image to be clear when you squint. and limit your palettes down - maybe in reality things are all sorts of colours, but if you look at films and comics with good / stylised (same thing to me, but that is just me) use of colour, that isnt the case. colour is streamlined for mood, meaning, and making comprehensive images.

another great thing these concept paintings do is layer up their landscapes to create greater depth, in a more mesmerising way.


(source, a really great comics workshop)
this ties in with their use of shading - the foreground is darker, higher contrast, key features standing out against the lighter backgrounds, and the further back you go the lower the contrast and lighter the layer. thats how you get that stunning depth

have you studied these paintings you wanna draw from? made copies? copying an artist you love (AKA transcription or master studies) is the best way to get an understanding of what they do so well

also, research into composition, contrast, and depth - theres lots of great resources out there to help you if you look

[punkarsenic]

Another problem is that I only have Paint tool Sai, so I can't use a lot of brushes these people use in their videos : /

ooh i didnt see this bit. paint tool sai is Legit made for painting - while i dont like its brush settings as much as CSP, you can still get great painterly effects in sai. play around, see what you can get - and look up painterly sai brushes, lots of people have shared some great settings.

[kuromonoart]

as far as I can tell you already have a fair knowledge of perspective, and your background is actually very good! like far better than a lot of webcomic with the amount of details and effort you put into it.
By comparing yours to the illustrations, I can see that you are looking at creating more DEPTH, however the quality you are aiming for takes a tremendous amount of time, maybe even more than the amount you've already spent currently, those illustrations are meant to be a one-off piece of artwork and to be honest, background doesn't play the major role in comic, some people could spend a little more time on a panel because of the background but they will move on to the next one, so often some people will feel discouraged because people don't fully appreciate it but it's just the way it is. Yet every comic needs backgrounds.

What I can tell you is that, go easy on it. Invest on about 2-3 key backgrounds for an episode for example. And from what I learnt from Japanese mangaka, you gotta go out and take a bucket load of photos of different locations and at different points of view for each locations, look at them and they will help you visualize the perspective which you can borrow directly from there, then add in whatever fantasy element to suit your need. (if you've already done so, good!)
A tip to create the background like those is maybe draw lineart, duplicate it and lower opacity and then create coloring layers between them so you don't leave outlines but can also see what you're painting over, paint it exactly like you're doing with traditional oil painting (a world different from cel shading)
For the tools to paint I think apart from CSP there's MedibangPaint? it did the job fairly well and easy to use which I have switched from CSP to use it more often.
Hope it helps.

[Jenny-Toons]

play around, see what you can get - and look up painterly sai brushes, lots of people have shared some great settings.

Yeah, this is the biggest key with this. With Paint-SAI, you can definitely find the brushes a lot of people use by making custom ones or getting custom ones from other people (there are plenty of people who do free ones on DA).

Also, you can create new brushes on SAI, which you can find here: https://en.softonic.com/articles/how-to-create-a-brush-in-paint-tool-sai

There also playing around with layers and opacity that can help create some distance in your work. It's all a matter of learning more skills and improving along the way.

[droidmonkey1]

I wish I could paint like those and I'm aiming for Ghibli style straight up traditional.
But from my limited experience with background, try and avoid black outline, and try using color as a way to define the buildings. you have to take account of light and shadows and their strength.
also try to texturing the building with color, like weathering or dirt, decay, colors getting dull from the sun.
when I look at your drawing the characters are swallowed by backgrounds, try to defuse the background so the characters will pop more.
These are some background I did. I'm teaching myself.
hope I helped.

[scythe]

The inspirational examples you've posted, while amazing, aren't really realistic as comic pages, not unless you're got a big professional team, or are willing to spend 10 years on one short book, or are somehow able to become one of those concept art freaks who can pump out that level of insanity in a couple of hours or less. (and let's be honest if you could do that, you'll probably be better off becoming a famous concept artist).

But having said that, there are creators on this very site putting out mind blowing backgrounds week after week, so maybe looking to their work will give you a better idea of what's possible.

Here are some of my favourites:

Scurry | Tapas

Thicker Than Blood :: Chapter 1: Welcome to Pendulum | Tapas

RISING SAND :: RS018 | Tapas

But how to get there? There's no way that I know of other than diving into the theory (which you can do easily on Youtube) and just spending thousands of hours honing your craft.

Personally, if I were you, I'd collect a lot of references of the kind of work you'd like to be putting out (again, be realistic, remembering you're going to need to be pumping out work regularly), and just study and emulate what you see.

Hope that helps, and to show you I know a little bit of what I'm talking about, here's a link to my comic, which has lots of detailed background work.

The Woken :: Chapter 1 – On the brink | Tapas

[aggressivelyhep]

A big part of what makes those inspiration images look so cool is the use of colour schemes and atmospheric perspective!

If you look at each image, you’ll notice they have three or four main colours that really stand out, giving each of them a distinctive feel. For example, the one with the rocks is mostly cool colours, ranging from dark blue to bright green to white, giving it a calm atmosphere. In contrast, the one with the witch’s has a really bold, constructing colour scheme that goes from dark blue to teal to bright yellow, and uses less midtones, making it look more dramatic. Creating a simple, unified colour scheme ensures your backgrounds don’t feel bland, and make your characters stand out against it!

You used a little bit of atmospheric perspective already, but you can push it even further by really simplifying the last “layer” of the background. Keep the colours of this layer close to the colour of your sky, and try colouring your lineart too to get it to really fade into the background. This really adds depth, especially when you have other things overlapping the back layer.

Finally, use your shading to create texture. Your art is cell-shaded, so you can’t go too crazy with gradients and textures, which is why it’s so important to use your shading for more than just flat fills. You did this pretty well with the natural stuff in the page you shared, so I did a small paintover showing how you can apply that to man-made objects like buildings too. Just the first panel though, I got a bit lazy.

Oh and also, don’t forget your cast shadows! When you shaded this page you took into account which parts of everything were receiving light, but not stuff like overhanging roofs and bay windows casting shadows on the stuff below them, which is important to avoid that Google Sketchup look mentioned upthread.

Sorry for the giant critique- hope it was helpful!

[MGComics]

Check out this guy's channel, he also gives classes as well to give tons of information for free. He's amazing and promise, you won't regret it.

Your backgrounds are already quite beautiful but hope he helps you get to the next level, talking about light source, values, textures, etc.

Tyler Edlin

He starts with this video in case you feel lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6BlTEytocc&list=PLkii92opOOAvJl8jvvFdJ7UXDFEO5Heic

[shazzbaa]

What makes a lot of these look good is the composition, actually!! There's a strong sense of foreground/midground/background and good colour/value composition that emphasises the important part of the scene!

Thinking about the scene in terms of forergound/midground/background can be a really powerful way to break out of thinking of them as "backgrounds" and instead thinking of them as "environments!" I think that when you look at "backgrounds"/environments as simply a backdrop for your characters, it's easy for it to end up feeling flat even when your perspective is good; to feel like the characters are in front of it instead of in it.

This is a real quick scribble so the perspective is obv not perfect, but look how much of a difference it makes to pull the camera down a bit so you can make that fountain a foreground element!

As far as perspective taking too long: here's a collection of some of my Cheater Perspective Advice I shared with a friend once. It focuses on architecture, since that's what tends to be the scariest kind of perspective to those unfamiliar with it, but honestly that sort of "hanging figures on a horizon line" works for anything as a way to quickly get a sense of perspective without going all out and breaking out the rulers.

Here's another example, something I scribbled up real quick to show a friend how I go about building a scene:

I sketch the two figures sitting together, figure out where to put the horizon line (I decided I wanted the buildings to be tall, so we should be looking up from low on the ground), then scribble a rough building to get a sense of where the vanishing point would probably be in that first drawing. In the second one I started adding a couple figures based on where they'd hit the horizon line so that I could get a good sense of sizing for the foreground and drew more of the building based on the rough perspective I've established, and then I started filling in details in that last sketch.

This was drawn very quickly and it's not Mathematically Perfect, but it's close enough and it gives a good sense of depth and feels like a real place -- because it has elements in different levels of foreground/midground/background and places the characters in the environment in a way that doesn't make it feel like a backdrop. I honestly think that's more important to a compelling environment than precision with perspective is!

[droidmonkey1]

What a bit of color in the right place can do to a picture.