You’re the artist I know best who does comic pieces so uh… you have tips on how to do backgrounds? I have a character drawn for a school project, but my teammate and I are turning her into a button for our presentation and we need a background, so any tips?
Sincerely, the self taught artist who can’t draw to save her life but tries anyway 💛
That sounds like a cool project and sure, always happy to help! There are a couple ways to do backgrounds for this kind of thing:
1. Use an existing photo from the web and then treat it in an image editor (like Photoshop for instance) so the lighting and feel fits the vibe you’re going for. You can play with filters and contrast - maybe add some noise to give it some texture, or a gradient or a colour overlay (or 5 lol) and play with the different blending options - and when you’re happy pop your character in and then make any further adjustments from there. The good thing about this kind of background is it’s pretty easy to get a quick result. With this you can also hand draw different elements over the top of the photo which can be fun!
Here are a couple of examples of this (I used Squeenix ffvii remake wallpaper bkgs that are available to download online) and in the case of the first one (second panel) I drew a quick room bkg and then used the Midgar bkg for the scene outside the window:
2. if you want it to be more hand drawn then grab as many references of stock photos as you can stand to have and make a moodboard with them to use as a reference sheet. Or even make up a collage background with the elements of each reference you’d like to include (because they may not all be in the same photo) and then sketch out your background from there. This one is definitely a bit more time consuming but it can yield some fun results.
Hand drawn bkg using pics of the Paris Skyline as a reference for the buildings and a ref of the reactors from in game:
Tools like perspective grids and (perspective) rulers are great to use as well so if you have them in your program definitely have a play!
And finally one of my favourite tricks is to use a Gaussian Blur which can work wonders to make the background look a bit less jarring and make your character stand out more. (Copy and paste the original layer first so you can revert back to the original just in case)
There are a ton of excellent tutorials for doing backgrounds on YouTube as well so if you’re really interested in getting into drawing them I’d definitely suggest have a look around!
I hope all of this makes sense helps! And good luck on your project!!!!
