I never liked painting landscapes or buildings. It just was never interesting to me. I prefer to go out in nature and STAND in it, maybe draw some cool little details in the land like leaves, rocks, and whatnot, but no, I never really liked painting landscapes and the few times I was inspired to make one, I was never happy with how it turned out.
That all changed when I started seriously working on Dragonrider’s Dance.
30 Backgrounds in 30 days for 30 minutes!
Why It’s Important To Be Good At Backgrounds
I wanted my characters to have beautiful places to stand in, so I spent some time working on landscapes, even having some panels that are just looking at different parts of the environment, no dialogue, nothing, just giving readers the chance to take a breath and enjoy the scenery.
That was what I was going for in the chapter, A Beautiful Place:
There’s also the obvious, like if you want a career in the arts, it’s good to have some impressive backgrounds in your portfolio, but really, I think it’s part of the experience of giving your audience the escapism they so desperately need. A beautiful place with gorgeous waterfalls, ancient ruins, even sentient trees are an important part of the experience. I’m providing a link to a YouTube video that talks about Miyazaki’s films and how he captures that feeling perfectly.
Why 30 Minutes?
Obviously, the backgrounds I’ll be using for reference took the artists longer than 30 minutes, but just for our purposes, forcing yourself to paint the most important details in a limited amount of time does several things. The goal isn’t to make 30 portfolio masterpieces, it’s only to improve at a specific skill. In this case, Fantasy Landscapes and Environments.
- Helps you learn how to make deadlines better
- It’s a good way of taking note where you might be struggling, then moving on and applying those lessons to the next day.
- It’s a good warmup excercise in the morning, if you’re spending 30 minutes making essentially practice art that you don’t care if it looks like a masterpiece just as long as it looks better than yesterday, then it’s a good way to before moving on with other art things you’re working on.
- If you’re doing this for a comic or animation, fortunately, people are only looking at the scene for just a few seconds anyway, by learning how to draw the most important, obvious things first, you can better achieve that experience without wasting so much time getting hung up on things that people aren’t going to notice anyway.
- It will help you better not compare yourself to others, but to who you were yesterday.
Day 1: The Landscape/Cottage From Beauty and the Beast
Reference:
What I Learned:
Well first off, I learned that I forgot how to do basic art. But that’s okay, this is Day 1 and I was just experimenting and painting what I saw.
Don’t paint background details first. I got too hung up on the house first. I started with making a white shape, then trying to block in the roof, the door, basically the details, but none of the rest of the landscape was getting done. Basically, I was trying to frost the cake before it was even baked.
Paint the buildings last. When painting mostly nature scenes with a cottage or some kind of man-made building, spend 5 minutes painting the nature first, the big blocky bits of color, the leaves before the trunks, etc. Essentially, start big and get smaller.
Have a very simple color pallet. 5 Colors or less. I did notice the trunks of the trees were very similar in color to the roof.
Just paint with normal brushes. There are so many tools when painting digital art. My mistake was using the lasso tool to get that more inorganic, building look, but it looks really weird.
Paint the whole thing in black and white first. Or brown and white… I mind end up trying that tomorrow. Notice how the volume in my example is very weird. It’s best to get the shadow and lighting and shadow down first before moving on to color.
For Day 2, Click here!
Thanks everyone for joining me today! If you would like to take part in this challenge, please put a link in the comments so I can see your progress! Please read my comic, Dragonrider’s Dance on dragonridersdance.com or Webtoon Canvas! It’s an exciting fantasy/fairytale/action comic about a world where dragons are all female and disguise themselves as princesses!