Hey! I love your style and your backgrounds are always spot on, even (or especially) in the Inferno comic. Is there a secret how your backgrounds are always so consistent or are you just *that* good? :D
hey!! : ) wow, thanks for your lovely message.
I struggled a lot with backgrounds, they don’t come easy to me. I always preferred to draw characters and drew backgrounds only if necessary :´) But then I became a storyboard artist and I had no choice but to learn dreaded perspective, because I am supposed to indicate the background in every shot and pay attention to continuity.
I don´t really have a secret to learning how to draw backgrounds other than, draw a lot of backgrounds and sooner or later you’ll become better ; ) That´s how I learned it, at least. I wouldn’t say that I am particularly good at this, but it´s so much easier now than it’s used to be. And fortunately we have background and layout artists in animation, to help us out.
But there are a few “tricks”, to make your life easier. Many comic artists use 3D models nowadays. For example, if you have a location in your comic and you know you will have to draw it a lot, you can speed up your process by building a simple 3D model of the location, set up cameras and export the images. This way you don’t have to put in the effort to make the background believable, copy-paste the image in there, trace it, add details and focus on the characters acting instead. There are lots youtube tutorials on how to do it. Some artists go out and take photographs from specific angles they need in their comic. Using references is not cheating. Use whatever helps.
Another thing that’s really helpful, is drawing a floor-plan. I do this a lot for storyboarding, especially if I have scenes with lots of characters. It helps with orientation and continuity. I will show you what I mean based on my comic, even though it’s a pretty simple set up with a long room and only two characters.
So, the floorplan for the throne room scene in my comic would look something like this. A long room with a throne on one end and the elevator on the other end. And the scene starts with Kylo on the throne and Hux in the elevator.
Then Hux walks up to Kylo. It´s an establishing shot to show a bit of the room and where the characters are in relation to each other.
Here are a few more examples throughout the scene.
What I am trying to show you is this. Let´s say you have done your thumbnails, you sort of know the camera angle for your panel and how you want to frame the characters. But you can´t figure out what´s going on in the background. By drawing a floorplan, adding characters as dots and a triangle for the camera, it´s pretty easy to figure out what you should see in the background. And to keep track of where the characters are standing in relation to each other. I find this approach very helpful for complicated scenes.
Of course, you have much for freedom in comics than you have in animation. It´s okay to cheat, because you want your panel to look cool. You can use crazy camera angels and perspective. Whatever supports your story : )
Wow, this is quite the long-post. I hope it makes sense!