#Not rendering this one only because im just lazy so you're only getting flat colors from me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nanistar · 1 year

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Any advice on how to draw backgrounds? Gotten to the point in my art where im semi confident in drawing poses and expressions but backgrounds?? girl help i can only somewhat draw a tree

oh hell yeah i love backgrounds, ive been working on more interiors lately (when not overburdened by sbc work lol) but im assuming you're asking about nature so that's how im going to answer it as okay so: -first of all find yourself a good TEXTURED blending/smudging brush because it will save your life. i use these rock texture brushes from This Studio Ghibli pack, it's $6 and i HIGHLY recommend the whole pack because it's the main one i use for most of my bg foliage/grass ect and i love it dearly

-find references either in irl photos or other artist's work. if using another artist's work watch their speedpaints or look at what you like about their art style and techniques and steal it. im serious. obviously don't trace it and pass it off as something of your own but look at how they do the aspects you struggle with, and try to incorporate that

for me, that struggle is forest foliage because i have a hard time filling out the spaces without everything looking like same colored blobs, so i looked at how my buddy hannah mudshadow does bgs because she's really good at filling out a scene and making it look natural, and i noticed she uses a lot of abstract shapes instead of trying to render every leaf, so rather than doing my base work for bushes/trees with a leaf brush, i use a chunky scatter brush now and it looks really good, and then i can go and add some leaf brushes on top of that for more definition in areas that might catch light ect so that will give it the thick, bushy .. bush look without looking crowded or too shaped

-nature is messy as hell and things are never going to be perfectly shaped and toned unless you're drawing perfectly managed hedges or something. got some dirt brown on your green bush? those are dead leaves now. accidental weird texture on your tree? the bark is gone there, something ate it. bushes and trees have dead branches that just hang out there in them, grass grows long and sometimes a deer or whatever doesn't eat the whole patch so there's long uneven sprigs sticking up. petals fall off flowers. trees have huge webs of branches

-don't try to detail everything. make things further away more abstract and messy to give the illusion of detail. throw a gradient over it for some slight tone variation or something so it;s not completely flat but ppl are going to look at your subject and see the rest of it with the corner of their eyes, so you don;t need to fully render every flower in the field. here's some examples of that

the cactuses in the far BG are just V and Y shapes, the joshua tree in the middle distance is dark with some light blobs right on the edge where the needles would catch light.

this is from 2021 so be nice to me but as the flowers go back in the distance, i stop rendering their petals and start doing blue dots with white dots, and then even further away i just sorta blend blue and green together to give the illusion of a field of flowers.

-i dont know what your style is, but i personally hate using a ton of layers and tend to merge them as i go, but for the most part i draw every panel of SBC bg on the same 1 layer, going back to front (start with sky, mountain, bg grass, foreground grass and cactus, then go back and scatter foliage as necessary) and it keeps my stuff loser and i tend to get less precious about making things look perfect. i also work very fast because i am unironically really lazy at art and am desperate for shortcuts.

-oh yeah one more thing. assuming you draw cats, cats are SOOOOOO small in comparison to literally everything. as warrior artists i think our perspective gets a but confused sometimes (i am certainly guilty of this too!) and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this because sometimes that's just how you have to build your scenes, but it really makes me laugh when i see scenes of like, rusty jumping off his fence to go into the woods, but the fence is only a bit taller than him. so try to remember things are huge and cats are small as hell

na'ni's a huge cat, all things considered but look at her compared to my small aloe plant

or the cedar tree in my front yard.

absolutely microscopic. don't look at my slippers.

so yeah. i hope this helps, it's not so much a tutorial because i don't think i'm the best person for tutorials because honestly i dont know much and this is all stuff i've picked up on, like i dont know shit about composition or values or color theory but this is important stuff to keep in mind about the environments themselves. don't worry too hard about colors at first because you can always change it by adjusting your curves n stuff. or slap a filter on that bad boy. or dont. also pay attention to your horizon line because it helps angle the rest of your piece. but look up tutorials for that because i only started learning about it like a week ago

#mine #art advice #idk man #ppl feel free to add on to this #nani irl

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