Fundamentals of Background Art for Animation: Go from Beginner to Pro

1. Fundamentals of Background Art for Animation_SKILLSHARE: Hi there, welcome to the fundamentals of background art for animation. A complete guide on how to create professional-looking artwork for an animated movie or a TV show. This class is also a complete guide on the exact job spec of a background artist in an animation studio. My name is Siobhan. I'm a top teacher here on Skillshare, and I have over 15 years experience working as a background artist in the animation industry in Dublin. I've made this class to help you if you are already a digital illustrator, but you feel that you're missing some fundamental building blocks in your artwork. Or you want to be able to build up your portfolio and show it to animation studios. I've also made sure that this class is perfect for beginners who want to dive into the world of digital art and start their journey towards becoming a professional background artist. Today, you're going to learn exactly what it's like to work in the industry. You'll learn the exact job spec of a background artist what you'll be doing every day in the studio, as well as what's expected of you in terms of your workflow and the art that you produce. You will also learn the core principles of good design. I'm going to teach you the concepts that are used in film production, and these concepts will form your framework for background art in order to ensure that you make art that supports the story as well as art that's beautiful to look at. After that, I'm going to teach you the exact skill set that you need to develop. You will learn how to do visual research. You'll learn what drawing skills to focus on and what painting skills to focus on. Digital art can be extremely broad, but by focusing on the right skill set, you're going to be able to build up your portfolio really quickly. Together, we're going to look at the four main pitfalls that every beginner falls into, so that you can avoid these common mistakes and create more professional looking art. In the final section of the class, we're going to put all of this knowledge together and work on one major class project. You're going to get to draw the layout as well as paint-up the final background for this Viking Village. Not only will this be a huge portfolio piece for you, it's going to be something that you can show to clients and to studios. Because this background demonstrates every important aspect and skill that you need in order to get hired. My goal in this class is not only to help you step-by-step throughout the process of learning this unique and valued skill set. But I also want to ensure that through sharing my own professional experience, you can feel confident moving forward in your art career and taking the next steps towards becoming a professional background artist for animation. 2. Introduction: In this introduction I'm going to explain how the class is structured, how to approach each section, and I also want to explain the brush pack that I've left for you. The first section of this class is all about the tools of the trade and by the actual job spec of a working background artist. I'm going to explain what you'll be doing in the studio and I'll break down the key design principles that you need to work with in order to create professional art. I'm going to explain specifically the difference between illustration and background art. I'll explain common terms like background artist, concept artist, environment designer, layout artists so that there's no confusion and you know exactly what you'll be doing in the studio when you do get hired. Then in the second section, I want to explain the core skill set of a background artist. This might not be what you expect. I brought it back down to the absolute core skills that you need to work on and you need to develop. We'll cut away all of the fluff, we'll get super clear on the main things that you need to focus on in order to improve quickly. Then in the final section, we'll take all of this knowledge and put it to use on one major background painting. Now, don't worry if this seems a bit overwhelming and detailed and complex. I'm going to walk you step-by-step throughout the entire process. In this class, we do a layout drawing first, but you're more than welcome when it comes to use my own layout drawing if you just want to practice painting. I'm fully aware that not all background painters are interested in layout drawings. That's completely fine if you decide to focus on just color and paint. But I would encourage you to watch the drawing videos so that you know the process and so that you're aware of the steps when it comes to working in a professional studio setting. If you are able to do both the drawing and the digital painting, then you're going to have two stand out pieces for your portfolio. This is going to demonstrate to studios that you can draw anything and that you have a really clear understanding of the entire production process. Throughout the painting process, I'm going to be using a number of texture brushes. If you've taken any of my other background design classes, it's likely that you'll have most of these brushes already. But I've left the specific brushes that I use in this class into a pack of its own. What you can do is go over to the projects and resources tab on the desktop, download the file there, then you want to just drag that file over to your Photoshop icon and release it. When you open up the brushes panel then, you'll see that folder added at the bottom of the stack. Then when you finished your project, be sure to post it in the project section. I'll be really happy to give you feedback or answer any questions that you have. Now, just a note, I've left my final painting purposely empty of stuff because I want you to have a go and adding more things in. At the very end of this class, I'm going to give you a challenge to add more Viking paraphernalia into your background. You could put in the long boat in the harbor for example or a broken down wagon or a pile of broken weapons, anything that you think this background needs. I'd love to see your interpretation of the brief and to see what you come up with. 3. The Tools of a Background Artist: In this lesson, I'm going to explain the tools that you'll need both for this class and for any work that you will be doing as a background artist. The main tools that I want to highlight are your software and hardware tools, and the brushes. Personally, I'm going to be working in Adobe Photoshop for this class. But you can use any digital painting app that you like, and you can follow along with me. Since we're going to be focusing on specific skills and approaches that you need to develop as a background artist. The software doesn't matter hugely, as long as you can apply those techniques to the specific app that you're working in. The reason that I choose Photoshop over something like Procreate or any other app, specifically for this class in particular, is because Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard. If you want to show your work to a prospective studio, and land a job as a background artist, it's going to be grace to be able to demonstrate to them that you can use professional-grade software like Photoshop. Background art for professional animation studios is nearly always done in Photoshop. The main reason, apart from the fact that it's a very robust program, it can create massive file sizes with little to no issues. But the main reason beyond that is that within any given background, you actually need to be able to work with multiple, if not tens of multiples of layers. That's really where I think Photoshop is ahead of the curve in terms of its ability to dynamically handle so many layers. In animation, not only do all of these layers become necessary, in order to create complex paintings, but very often some of the elements within the background will need to be animated themselves, and for that reason they need to be on separate layers. If you are committed to learning the art and craft of background design, then I highly encourage you to try out Photoshop. You don't have to buy it. You can have a test it for a while for a couple of weeks and see if you like it. The other tool that you'll need and this one you can't really get around is having a drawing tablet and a pen. If you're on the iPad, you'll need an Apple pencil. But if you're on a laptop or a desktop, then you can get a cheap drawing tablet. But again, I might encourage you to invest in a decent, good quality one like a Wacom. My setup is very, very simple. I use a Wacom Intuos Pro. It's nothing fancy. I've had this now for years and it just has never, ever let me down, and it's great. I highly recommend it. Then the last tool that I want to highlight is your brush pack. Now, it's been said many, many times that you should be able to paint something complex with the simple default Photoshop brushes. But let's be honest, you do want to have an extensive selection of texture brushes in order to create a wide range of textures really quickly. For this class, I have left a couple of brush packs for you to download, and to experiment with and use in your own class project, and in your work going forward. But I also want you to be able to know where to find brushes and where you can start building up your own library of brushes. My go-to marketplace to find awesome brush packs is Gumroad. I recommend that you buy your brush packs from artists over there. Another place you can also check out is ArtStation. Definitely do your research, invest in brush packs that you think you will use, and just know that there are tons of resources out there for you. You don't have to be limited to what you have within Photoshop or within the app that you're working in. I don't want you to feel that that's restricting you. In the next lesson, I'm going to give you a brief overview of my own Photoshop workspace, and how you can set yours up to look just like mine. 4. Overview of the Workspace: In this lesson, I'm going to go over my specific Photoshop workspace, how I set it up so that you can match your workspace to mine if you're following me in Photoshop yourself. I'm going to go ahead and open up my Photoshop. Once it's loaded, the default welcome screen opens up. I'm going to go up here to New File and just click on that just to get started. I'm going to change these to, let's go with just a regular Canvas size 1920 by 1080 is pretty much standard default screen size. If you wanted to put them in, you could type in the numbers up here. The only other one that you might want to change is RGB color. Just make sure that it is on RGB and not CMYK or grayscale or anything like that. RGB color is the color profile for any screen artwork. Let's work in RGB. Click "Create", and then this is how my Photoshop is set up. I wanted to point out that if you come up here to this tiny little icon up here and click on this, this layout is saved as Siobhan's workspace. Let's say you open up and you're on something that looks a little bit like this. Let me close this. Maybe yours even look something like this. Essentially, you're going to have all of your drawing, painting, manipulation, editing tools on the left-hand side of your screen. On the right you'll have a load of panels. My personal preference when I'm creating artwork like background designs for animation is to have as much screen space as possible. The first thing that I do is I tend to collapse these menus back into the side. All of these icons are smaller. However, I will grab something like layers and I'm going to just click and drag that out. This I will make sure is quite visible. I'm going to drag it until I see this blue line along the right-hand side, and then I will release. Now that's going to be on its own doc if you like. The other panel that I like to have open is my color panel. Since it's not here, and this is a good example of what to do. If you see that something that you want is not already nested into the right, you can just come up to Window and find it from here, from this drop-down menu. Here's color. I'm going to click on that, and it opens up as a floating window. Again, I'm going to click and drag it. This time I'm going to nest it up at the top above layers. I've now got layers and I've got my color. Those really are the two most important windows that I need to be able to access throughout the process. Now, just be aware that your color window might not look the same as mine. That's not a problem. Yours might very well look like this. Or sometimes it can display like this. All it is really is just simply a way of viewing the color spectrum. I like personally to look at it in this color wheel because it gives me a really good quick understanding of where my color is and also where the saturation of that color or the brightness or darkness of that color is. This top slider here where it says H, that's the hue. Essentially, you can drag it along and you'll notice this little cursor going around the wheel. Let's say you wanted a green, that's fine. Down on this slider, you can set the saturation, so you can have it completely desaturated or very highly saturated green. On this slider here where it says B, you can adjust the brightness. Essentially, it can be all the way down to the darkest version, which is black. You can drag it up to the lightest version of that hue. Then over on the right-hand side, these are your brushes, your drawing tools, and eraser tools. As we move through the class, and we'll go step-by-step through the entire process of both drawing and painting, I will explain every step that we do and I'll explain all of the tools that are used. But I just want you to be aware that the main tools that we're going to work with are the brush tool. If you click on that or hit B on your keyboard, the brush will come up. Up here, you can set the size or the shape of the brush, different parameters like that. You can also come up here and affect the opacity of the brush that you're using. You can affect the flow. I generally don't ever change the flow of the brush, but I will often drag the opacity of my brush down just because it can help with painting to give some nice buildup effects. You can also, when you're in the brush mode, just right-click anywhere on the Canvas with the brush selected, and that'll give you a very quick access to your brush menu. Later on I'll be talking about the brushes that I've left for you. I've got a bunch of landscape brushes and some painting brushes, break it, or painting brushes that I'll leave for you to download and you can experiment with them and try out different ones and see which ones are going to give you the effects that you're looking for. When you're painting and you're blending or mixing colors on the go as you can see, if the opacity is down low, you can paint over color and create a brand new color essentially. One of the workflows that I really like to use is while I'm working with the brush, I can hold down Option or Alt on your keyboard. That is a toggled between whatever tool you're using and the eyedropper. If I'm in the brush mode and I hit Option or Alt, I can quickly select the new color on my canvas and paint with that, and that provides really nice blending. Another tool that I want to point out and just make sure that you know, can identify where it is on your keyboard. Well, two other tools, but the one is the pen tool down here. Just hit P on your keyboard and that should bring up the pen tool. The way to work with the pen tool is literally to click and drag at these vector points. Once you click onto any space on your Canvas, that creates a vector point. If you click and drag at the same time, you can create handles. Those handles can be moved to affect the shape of the curve that you're drawing. If you jack over here, there's a white swatch under my swatches, and that's why this shape looks like there's nothing in it, but it's actually filled with white. To change the color of that, just double-click onto the icon of the layer and choose new color from your color picker. Click "Okay". The other tool that we will work with a lot for painting is the lasso tool. Up here, you can click and hold on to this icon and you'll see that there's the lasso tool in three different types. There's the regular lasso, the polygon lasso, and magnetic lasso. I never really use the magnetic one. I just worked between the regular lasso and the polygon. But I will be explaining in more detail how to work with these when we get into another section in a later section in the class. Let me know if you have any questions about how to set up your own Photoshop workspace. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Using the Painting and Drawing Tools: In this lesson, I want to go over some of the specific tools that I'll use throughout this course and just give you a brief overview at the beginning so that you know what to expect when you get to use them, but I will be explaining step-by-step as I go, each of the tools throughout the drawing and painting process later on. But you might want to bookmark this lesson and refer back to it if one of the tools that you work with doesn't look quite the same as mine. The main drawing and painting tools that I use are the Lasso tool, the Pen tool, the Brush tool, and the Bucket tool. One other tool that I'd like to highlight is the Eyedropper or color selection tool. Let's run through each of them now. The Lasso tool, which is L on your keyboard, is up here. If you hit "L", you'll see that it becomes selected. Just go over, click and hold down on the tool, and you'll see there are three different types, regular, polygon, and magnetic. The regular Lasso allows you to draw freehand, drawing curves and it's almost like drawing with a pencil or a pen. What happens is that you get a selection based on what you've just drawn. You can either fill that selection, hit "G" on your keyboard to bring up the Bucket tool and that will fill with whatever color is in the foreground of your Swatches over here. But you can also use this to make interesting painting effects. If I hit "B" instead on my keyboard and bring up the Brush tool and choose one of my painting brushes, you'll see that it does offer a unique way to paint and create shapes. The polygon Lasso will draw a shape from point to point, so you have to click down on the Canvas and that creates the points and then you can close it up when you're finished. Then your selection is active and you can go with that in the exact same way as before. You can use the Brush tool or the paint Bucket tool, whichever you want. Now, there is a way to combine both the polygon and the regular Lasso when you're drawing. It's very handy and it's something that I use a lot if I'm drawing a complex shape that needs or requires both a straight line as well as a curved line and you'll see me using this a lot in the later stages of my background painting. But I wanted to show you how to do that now, so let me just create a new layer. Hit "L" on my keyboard and right now I'm in the Polygon mode of the Lasso tool. I'm going to start clicking out a shape and I'm getting my nice straight lines. But if at this stage I wanted to make a curved line, what I'm going to do is hold down Option or Alt on your keyboard and start to draw a curved line like that. I'm going to release Option or Alt and then I'm back into the straight line. Pressing down Alt or Option to get that nice curve. Essentially holding down Option or Alt allows you to toggle between the regular Lasso and the Polygon Lasso. Let's see. Will also work if we're in the regular Lasso. I'm drawing curved line and now I want to go for a straight line and I want to hold down Option or Alt on your keyboard. That's the Lasso tool. It's very useful to draw and paint with and the other tool that I use to draw and paint is the Pen tool. I'm going to hit "P" on my keyboard and that'll select it right there. If you click and hold down onto it as well, you can see that there are different kinds of Pen tools, much in the same way there are different Lasso tools. I generally stick to just the regular Pen tool. It's a wonderful tool. You can click onto your Canvas to create these vector points and then click and drag to create these handles. Once you've got these handles created, you can affect them by holding down Option or Alt on your keyboard and then you can drag your vector points around. Once you've created the shape and you want to actually go back in and change some of the vector points, click on the shape itself. You'll see that the shape's now active and then hold down Command or Control on your keyboard. That will bring up the sub selection tool and then if you click on the points, you're able to edit them directly, grab them, move the handles around if you need to. So that's the Pen tool. Now, the one thing that I do want to mention about the Pen tool is that you need to make sure your parameters are the same as mine. Come up to the top here. Along the top here are the properties of each tool that you select. I always have mine set to shape, not path or pixels. The other thing then is make sure your fill is active, but your stroke is not active. I never draw with the Pen tool with a stroke on, so always come down here and make sure that that box is clicked so that the stroke is not active. Now, the Bucket tool is fairly easy, very straightforward. It's just G on your keyboard and it essentially fills the entire space or the entire selection. The Brush tool, so if you click on "Dash "or hit "B" on your keyboard, the brush will come up. Up here you can set the size or the shape of the brush, different parameters like that. You can also come up here and affect the opacity of the brush that you're using and you can affect the flow. I generally don't ever change the flow of the brush, but I will often drag the opacity of my brush down because it can help with painting to give some nice build-up effects. You can also, when you're in the brush mode, just right-click anywhere on the Canvas with the brush selected and that will give you a very quick access to your brush menu. When you're painting and you're blending or mixing colors on the go, as you can see, if the opacity is down low, you can paint over a color and create a brand new color essentially. One of the workflows that I really like to use is while I'm working with the brush, I can hold down Option or Alt on your keyboard. That is a toggle between whatever tool you're using and the Eyedropper. If I'm in the brush mode and I hit Option or Alt, can quickly select the new color on my Canvas and paint with that and that provides really nice blending. Let me know if you have any questions about how to set up your own Photoshop workspace and when you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. The Job Spec of the Background Artist: In this lesson, I want to give you an idea of what exactly your job will look like when you do get hired by an animation studio and become a working background artist. On a day-to-day basis, a background artist is not necessarily creating big environments and digital paintings. It's really more likely that you'll be painting backgrounds based on a given environment. You're still creating new artwork but your paintings will be based on existing work. Essentially there is a separation of duties between something like a concept artist or an art director, a layout artist, and a background painter. The art director is usually going to be the artist who comes up with the overall look of the show and that's someone who will be painting the main key locations. Key locations are the really big paintings that determine the color scheme, the mood, and atmosphere. They're usually the wide-angle shots of each of the locations where the story takes place. On some productions, not all of them but on some productions, a different person called a layout artist might be called upon to draw up detailed line work of these important scenes. However, on most shows, the background artist might be called upon to both draw up a shot or a scene in line and also to paint it. Your skill set definitely needs to be able to cover clean line work as well as glorious color in your painting. Let's say on a show, you've got something like 10 key locations that have already been determined, they've been painted up by the art director, and you also have a locked storyboard that was completed in pre-production and which shows exactly in every shot where the characters are and things like that. That storyboard will also give an indication, not always exact, mostly just an indication of what the background is going to be. What happens then is that you'll be assigned each scene as indicated in the storyboard shot by shot and you'll have to make backgrounds for every scene based on the art direction and based on the key locations. For example, in this shot here, this is a key location of the pirate cabin on board the ship, but in the storyboard, there may be a shot, say, of this corner. You'll need to be able to visualize it from that angle, make a line drawing of it, show it to the director, get it approved, and then paint it up using the colors and the assets that are already created in this main painting. As a background artist, you'll also need to be able to quickly make changes and revisions to your work and that's a key part of the job. In the workflow, it will usually go something like this. You take one day to paint up a background. You will then send that background off to the art director to approve it. You mark it as done on the call sheet and then you come in the next day and you check the call sheet to see if that background has been reviewed and if it has, what are the notes? There might be some notes like move the table to the left because the captain has to have more room to walk in, or you might get a note that says this background doesn't hook up to the previous one because it's from the wrong angle and then you'll have to change that. Your revisions aren't really ever going to be that huge, I would say, but you do need to be able to quickly turn those revisions around and move on to the next background. When you have major revisions, you need to save that file out as a VO2, place it back in the production folder, and never save over or delete your version 1 because they may need to go back in and use that again. Once that's all done, you can have a break, have tea or coffee, and then you can start on the new background for the day, which will be waiting for you in your to do folder and that will be based on the next panel in the storyboard. That's a very brief overview of the job spec of a background artist and I hope that demystifies or clarifies certain aspects to the job. Essentially, when you're starting out as a background artist, you are working with predetermined paintings, predetermined concepts. You are never really creating completely from scratch, but in your portfolio, you do need to demonstrate to a production house or production studio that you can draw something from scratch, you can make conceptual art and you can visualize and create a brand new background based on just an idea. That's hopefully what we're going to achieve in this course together as we move through making the background of the Viking Village. But before we get to drawing and painting the Viking Village, I'm going to go over some of the very key principles that you should always have in mind. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. The Principles of Staging and Framing: In this section, I'm going to cover the most important concepts and principles that you need to know about in making background art for animation. These principles are really not often discussed as a cohesive framework. You hear about one or two of these from time to time, or you might come across one here, another there. But I really think that it's crucial to see each of these principles as literally your framework for understanding how to create good background art. You can think of these in the exact same way that you might think about the 12 principles of animation if you're an animator. I'm going to cover the three most important principles. The first and the most important principle that you need to be aware of when you're creating background art is the principle of staging. Alongside that, I'm also going to add the principle of framing. I'm going to treat both of these as first principle, basically. Staging and framing is first on the list because your job as a background artist is to provide a scene or setting for the characters. Your job really isn't to make a nice illustration. An illustration is very different to background art for animation. Essentially, your job is to create a stage for the action to take place. In that sense, your work has to be designed in such a way as to give space for the characters, that's staging and to point or direct the viewers eye to where those characters are, that's framing. Staging is literally the idea that your background is a stage. You want to give space for the characters to move around if they have to. You need to always know where those characters are in any given scene. To do that, you will either be drawing from a storyboard panel, so you will know, or you will be told by the director. Remember background art is art that's already in production. It's not concept art, it's painting that is actually going to be used in conjunction with animation. If you know that the characters walk on screen and stand in the middle, don't draw or paint elements right in the middle of the scene, no matter how much you think that it would really work and be really nice to have them there. Keep the space clear and open for characters. Then framing. Again, framing means how you show the audience what it is you want them to see. The simplest way to do that, if you're painting an establishing shot or a wide shot or like a wide angle of a scene, is to use objects around the edges of your frame that literally frame the central focal point or the point of interest wherever that may be. Another way though, if you're creating a different a shot, not necessarily an establishing shots, you can also use something called leading lines. This is where items within the background are aligned so that they're pointing in a specific direction. They create lines that are almost imperceptible to the audience. They're not obvious, but they work powerfully to draw the eye towards that area of the screen that you want to show. 8. The Principle of Composition: Next up we have composition, the principle of the rule of thirds. Now the rule of thirds is so simple, but I want to give you some alternative ideas about it, or at least give you something else to think about. There's no doubt in my mind that you already know what the rule of thirds is. It's just constantly mentioned as the way to set up your drawing. But if you don't know what it is, simply push. It's a way of dividing up the frame or screen into equal thirds that really just allows us to make a composition based on these distinct parts of the frame. Having your focal point or your point of interest in one of these sections or on one of these intersections that say, that can usually create an image that's pleasing or interesting to look at, rather than just centering things statically in the middle. Now, the rule of thirds works. It does make a good composition. Don't get me wrong, I always check my work against the rule of thirds. However, when you're working with a storyboard panel or a suggested thumbnail, as a background artist, more often than not, your composition is already determined. As we already discussed with regard to staging and framing, your first priority is to make space for the action. When you hear about the rule of thirds and you're told always place your points of interest on these points, remember that that's not always going to be applicable to the work of a background artist. I wanted to explain in this lesson that the rule of thirds or the magic circle or the Fibonacci, whatever, can create a pleasing image to look at. But as a background artist, you're not there to create a pleasing image in a vacuum. You're telling or helping to tell a much larger story of which this one shot or this one scene is only a small piece. Yes, as a concept artist or an illustrator, it's a very good guideline to follow. But as I said already, we're working in production or creating production art, so we need to be really mindful about where this fits in and what's required in terms of the animation. Your first decision in terms of composing the shot always you need to decide what's the story point of this shot or the scene. Sometimes placing your focal point in the center is actually more important to the story point. As a very broad rule of thumb or guideline here, a centrally composed shot can sometimes be read as being more organized, it can imply tradition, stability, the status quo, whereas a composition that favors just one side or other of the screen implies a dynamic scene, a sense of conflict even, or a sense of journey and excitement. Remember that in composing your art, you want to support the story points. You can artfully do that using framing to point the viewer's eye towards the action and following the composition that's set up in the storyboard that prioritizes where that action is. 9. Creating the Illusion of Depth: The third principle that I want to cover here is the illusion of depths. This is really a vital principle for the background artist. To me, it's even more important than the rule of thirds. You need to always be constantly thinking about how you can create an illusion of depth in your work for one simple reason. The illusion of depth is what's going to help your viewer feel that they can step into the world that you are creating. That's a hugely important aspect of animation. In an animated world, anything is possible and your audience wants to believe that it's real and that they can almost step into and experience this other world. There are many ways to create the illusion of depth, such as drawing strong perspective, which we will cover in the next section. But you can also create depth by overlapping elements within your background. When you do this, it immediately feels like there's depth because the eye reads these overlaps as literally taking up space and volume. That creates space behind each one. Another very powerful way to create depth is to indicate scale. Scale means how big or small something is. In the background, you can have things that obviously are getting smaller in the distance according to the rules of perspective, where something that's closer to the viewer is much larger than something that's further away. Remember that one of the easiest ways, or the clearest ways of ways to establish perspective scale is to use the same item. Just make sure that you have one close to the viewer and then one further away that is smaller. The eye is going to read the two things and know immediately the one that's smaller is much further away and that will create a sense of depth. I also wanted to mention that there's one thing that will always allow the audience's eye to immediately understand the scale that you're trying to establish within your background. There's one thing that if you put it into your digital painting or into your background, it will immediately show us how tall things are. That one thing is a person or a figure. Because we are people ourselves, we immediately can read and understand scale in relation to a human figure within a scene. It's that simple. You can see the difference between a small figure versus really big figure. But as a background artist, you are not really dealing with characters that much. You don't always have characters in your shots. Unlike a concept artist in background art, we can't really always put it in a traveling stick salesman. Then what else can we do? Well, another option is to just imply human activity or show something that you know is easily recognizable as something that a human would use. Something as simple as a doorway, or even a vehicle, a bicycle, or something like that. If you put things like that into your background art, the viewer will understand that size because it relates to the size of a human figure. Therefore, scale can be established almost immediately. 10. The Key Skill Set of a Background Artist: The three skills of a background artist are visual research, drawing and painting. If you can do visual research, collect images and recall details based on your references, if you can draw structure, believable, 3D solid structure, if you can work creatively with color, then that's all you really need to be a digital artist or a background artist. All of the rest, the style, the textures, the concepts, these are all techniques that you can add on and build upon. But these three aspects form the underlying absolute key, most important foundational skills that you need to develop in order to be a background artist. Now, throughout the rest of the course, we're going to explore and develop your drawing, your painting, and I'm going to coach you along the way in how to practice these two skills. But in this lesson, I want to talk about visual research. Firstly, a word on visual research versus drawing from imagination. The great artist, Kim Jung Gi, who sadly passed away recently, but in one of the last interviews that he gave, he was asked what are the main pieces of advice that he has for beginner artists. His very first point was that it's so important to collect visual reference and to add that to your experience of real-world objects, places, and people. If you see someone drawing from their imagination, you must know that they're skilled at being able to recall what they've researched or what they've experienced is what you're seeing. Is not imagination is not just pulled out of absolutely nowhere, it's all about their ability to recall an experience. Visual research is really the first and foremost skill that you need to develop. Here are some tips for how to do visual research. The first one is obviously to start from where you are and literally take in your surroundings. Try to be visually aware and interested in the objects and places that you're seeing on a daily basis. Just looking at things is a powerful way to increase your skill level very fast. Remind yourself to notice the light around you at different times of the day. Notice or look at the structure of things and how they occupy space. If you can, start to draw these things from life. Start a sketchbook practice if you haven't got one already and try to draw from life as much as you can. It's not always possible, but if you can manage to draw from life, it's going to be one of the fastest ways that you will improve your drawing overall. If you're good at capturing images, then you can start to make a habit of taking photos of things that you see and collect them in a dedicated folder. When it comes to drawing and painting specific backgrounds or specific art pieces, then obviously the next step is to do research online for the object or the place that you are drawing. For example, for this project, I went ahead and typed in Viking Village into Google and based on all of the images that Google spat out, I started to make a mood board, which is literally just a collection of images that I liked, images that resonated with what I had in mind about what I wanted to do, and also images that I just found interesting to look at myself. A mood board doesn't have to be specific or doesn't have to be overly specific, it can be just a collection of images that you like the colors that you see. Pinterest is great for collecting images. My recommendation is make a mood board like this, then study it for a while just by looking and noticing the things that stand out or the things that you might not even have noticed in an image at first. Then when you're ready to start drawing, put this mood board away and try to draw based on what you remember. Let your recall takeover and try to draw something new based on how you remember it. That's the way I approach visual research for any project at all. I tried to not look too much at other concept artists finished artwork, although I do have to mention a website like ArtStation is an amazing resource for artists and you can get so much inspiration from looking at other artist's work. But try to resist finding artwork that you think is so awesome that you want to just replicate or duplicate. Try to just allow yourself to be inspired by what you see there. Do your research on the actual physical objects and things that you're trying to draw. Then put all of that research away and try to start drawing from your memory. In the next section, we're going to move into drawing. I'm going to talk a little bit about foundational fundamental skills that background artists need to know about for drawing. I'm specifically going to mention some of the really major pitfalls that I see a lot of beginner artists falling into when it comes to drawing. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. 11. Core Drawing Skills - Confident Lines: We've covered the job spec of a background artist. We looked at the key principles for creating background art, and I've talked about the skill that you need to develop our visual research and visual memory. All of these topics should hopefully start to form a really strong basis for your work and help you to gain confidence in the next steps that you're going to take. Those next steps are developing your drawing and your painting skills. In this section of the class, we're going to start the class project. I want to show you step-by-step how to draw a complex layout like this. Having this line drawing in your portfolio is a really important piece. It'll demonstrate to studios that you can draw anything and that you have a good understanding of the foundational skills that are so important. I want to show you exactly how to do a drawing like this. But along the way, I also want to point out some common mistakes that I see beginner artists make in their drawing, and show you what they are so that you know how to improve on them in your own work. Before we dive in to this drawing, I want to give you some drawing drills that I want you to work on. If you do these drawing drills regularly, you'll be amazed at how quickly your drawing will improve. I'm going to hop over to Photoshop. I've made a new Canvas here. This is really just going to be for these drawing drills, but I will make a new layer above the background layer. For the brush size, I'm just going with one of the default Photoshop brushes here, just this hard round brush. The pixel size is about 12 for this Canvas, and I've also made sure that the opacity is up to 100. These drills are going to help you to improve the confidence of your line. Having confident, strong line work is really important. All you have to do for these drills is fill a page, do a series of straight lines going from left to right or even right to left, and just continue doing it until you feel that you can draw pretty much a straight even line in one sweeping motion. You can also go diagonally. You'll notice I'm not stopping or starting in the middle. I'm not going like dash. It's really one sweeping motion. I'm trying to keep my arm as steady as possible. I'm not drawing from my wrist or my hand. I'm really almost drawing. It's like I'm drawing from my shoulder. Like this, so when you've done all of that, I want you to do another drill, and this one is pretty much the same. But what you're going to do is make a series of dots on your Canvas like this. Another series of dots over here. Then I'm going to use a different color just for the sake of it, and I'll make a new layer, and this drill is all about control. You want to be able to draw a straight line from one point to the other. It doesn't matter which. Let's just pick this one. But the idea is that you start here and you end there, so this one is not so easy. But you've got to try and it's actually very tricky to do this. I'm not getting any of these rice. Oh, there we go, nearly. Here we go. I suppose if you draw slow enough, you can. But the point is to try and draw fast and have control. If you wanted to, there is a way that you can rotate your Canvas. If you feel that you are comfortable only drawing in one direction, like personally, I seem to be able to do make quite a nice even line if I go from the bottom left to the top right. If that's the same for you, and you want to draw, going the other way. You can hit R on your keyboard and rotate your Canvas around. Even have it at a bit of an angle and that might help you as well. Give that one a go for sure. Another one, fill the page with circles. I'm going to try to draw perfect circles quickly. Don't go too slowly. It's much easier if you go slower, but then you'll see that the line becomes much more wobbly. Try to be fluid, fast and confident with your line. The last drawing drill is training yourself to draw over the same pathway. Let's say, if you draw a box like this, and then you come back and try and draw over the line again. This is a really good exercise to do as well. 12. Drawing Perspective: The next vital skill that you need to develop for drawing is perspective drawing. This is the first major pitfall that I see beginners falling into and the greatest challenge that people starting out with background design in particular, the greatest challenge that they run into. In this lesson, I want to show you how you can get really good at perspective. It is incredibly simple and you might even avoid this exercise because like the drawing drills that we did in the previous lesson for confident lines it seems too simple to have any effect but I guarantee you that if you draw boxes and cubes, you will ramp up your ability to draw in perspective really quickly. You will then be able to develop it further into much more complex three-point perspective or extreme perspectives. Let's go through the main basic points that you need to know. First up, one-point perspective. Start with a horizontal line across your canvas like this. Now, this line is called the horizon line but it's effectively your eye-line or the camera's eye-line. Anywhere on this line, you can draw a dot and this dot is called the vanishing point. Now, the vanishing point is the direction that you're looking in. From this point, simply draw radiating lines going straight out. Hold on Shift on your keyboard as you do this and you'll be able to draw a straight line and then once you've done that, draw parallel lines to that main horizon line or eye-line like this. Now, you've got a perspective grid. On top of this grid, you can start to draw boxes and cubes following these lines. You can follow them exactly or approximately, doesn't really matter. This isn't a technical drawing course. I wouldn't get too rigid about it so long as you are consistently following the direction of the grid lines underneath. As I said, we're not making architectural or engineering drawings, we're making art, so you can draw free-hand and you can be a little bit loose with this. If you do that, I think it will help you to be more instinctive as you draw in the long run anyway. That's one perspective. Essentially one-point means that we are looking at the front of these boxes that are facing us. Let's look at two-point perspective. Again, draw a horizon line through the middle of your canvas and this time place two dots along this line. Now you've got two vanishing points, hence the term two-point perspective. Again, draw radiating lines from each of these dots. If you're having trouble to draw a straight line, tap your pen at one point, say on the vanishing point, hold on Shift and tap it at the end point and that'll give you a straight line. Now once you've finished drawing all of your radiating lines from each of these dots, you actually don't need to draw parallel lines because these intersecting lines are essentially your grid. Now start to draw cubes and boxes on top of this just like you did for one-point perspective. You can immediately see that what we're looking at here is not the front side of the box but we're actually seeing both sides at an angle and so that's what characterizes two-point perspective. This really simple exercise for one-point and two-point perspective, like I said, it is going to develop your ability to draw perspective in any sense. Get to work with these simple exercises. Practice drawing cubes and boxes on one-point and two-point grids. I think it's really important to fully master both of these simple perspective drawings before moving on to complex three-point perspective or extreme angles. I really encourage you to spend time working on these basic principles first. 13. Drawing Rough: As I explained in the earlier lesson on the job description of a background artist. When you're working on the job, you will nearly always have a guide or a sticky location to work from, if not a storyboard panel so you won't necessarily be starting a drawing from complete scratch unless of course you're part of a pre-production team and you're working on a concept art piece or you're developing the project. Having said that for the project in this class, I want this to be for a piece that you can have in your portfolio. I want to show you how to start a drawing from the very beginning and how to bring that all the way through to a completed finished painting. This is the way I usually approach a drawing process like this. Having done all of my visual research and having created a mood board, studied it, I now have an idea of the overall composition in my mind. This part is really important. Before you start your drawing, you should try to visualize your shot or scene and be really clear about how you want it to look, even if that is going to change as you progress through the painting. Just starting out, having like an image in your mind. Try to train yourself to be thinking visually like that. The first step then in the entire process is to just make a really rough sketch. Over here in the layer stack, I'm going to create a new layer above this locked background layer. I don't want to draw on that, and then I'm going to choose a dark color. Black is fine, and just a very simple round brush. Now you can use the default Photoshop brush or a small texture brush if you prefer to have it look more like a pencil, it doesn't matter for this rough sketch. Then I like to always draw a frame on my page just to start out and this helps me to compose the initial sketch, and it also feels like a good way to start because something is on the blank white page already. So that's what I do. Feel free to do that. Then starting on the left, I'm really just sketching out some simple shapes. I want a shape for the house or a cabin. I'm going to draw one behind this one and I'm keeping it really blocky and very simple. If I were to make a really rough thumbnail to show you what it is I'm visualizing in my mind, this is more or less like I'm seeing. I'm thinking about houses here. Maybe some mountains in the background, and an open middle ground, and also some foreground elements just to frame the scene. I feel that these cabins or these houses might have steps going down to the ground, or at least they're raised up a bit on some ground and they've got these very iconic-looking Viking roofs with details. But for now, I'm not going to go into super minute details at all. I just want to just block it out really. Back here, there could be a boat in the harbor. I know the C is going to be back there. It might be nice to have one of those iconic Viking boats. This is how I'm going to work through the sketch idea. And at any point, if you want to change up your line work, instead of erasing it out and starting over, just use your selection tool. Hit L on the keyboard, select part of your line work. Once it's selected, then you can hit V and move it around and then hit Command or Control D to de-select and go back to drawing. Over here on the right, there's going to be more of these houses, maybe one closer to us. It's going to be bigger. I don't want to have this maybe having steps going down. I want the roof to have a bit of strong and I think, and then now I'll add in just an indication of the foreground, like the ground is rising up here. We're going to be looking down on this scene or on this village. Now at this point, I've selected the drawing using Command T and that brings up the free transform tool. I'm just moving it around to see if there's a better composition really, or if I need to change the angle that we're looking down on us. Sometimes it's hard to move the line drawing around by just using V or the Selection tool. I often use the free transform tool to move lines, since that selects the whole thing and it's much easier to move. Another good tip to mention at this point is to flip your canvas horizontally to see your drawing in a mirrored version. That can really help to identify those compositional errors that your eye might not pick up on because it's used to seeing one way. If you flip it over, they stand out, really in the early stages, it helps you to balance out your drawing. Well, that's looking okay. I think I'm going to sketch in and indicate the background here, mountains and forests. That is very simple, a few lines just to indicate those background elements and they fill up the space really nicely. Just going to work over this again, still very rough and loose and this really is the very first step in my process. Now, I wanted to say there are many ways to start a painting. You can block in with grayscale values. You can start painting with colors. You don't even have to do an actual drawing. This is not to say that this is the only way to start your background. But I did want to focus on drawing skills in the section of the course. Because I think it's really important to understand how to draw the underlying structure of any background and to start out with a rough line drawing. We are going to refine this drawing a few times just to get it to be a finished layout. But it's going to make it much easier if we start the whole process like this. Keep your initial rough sketch very simple. Don't over-complicate things just yet. I know that I want to have lots of Viking paraphernalia on the roofs, on the doors. I want shields and things like that, but I'm in no way going to start drawing them now. This is a really simple start and you can get much more complex step-by-step as you go along. 14. How to Check Perspective: In this lesson, I want to show you how you can check your perspective on a rough drawing like this. This is my preferred way of working. The reason behind this is simple. If I were to have started out with a very structured perspective grid and try to draw the scene that I'm working on or that I'm visualizing my mind on top of that grid or according to that perspective, I would be restricting myself a lot in terms of just letting the composition come through and get generating ideas for the final piece. I want to be able to approach this background from a more natural, instinctive or intuitive approach rather than trying to start out very rigid and strict about things like perspective. I find that when you start out drawing perspective first, it really tightens up the composition and it stops you from being a little bit more imaginative. That's the way I would do it. I like to start intuitively and then add structure and perspective on top of that. What I'm going to do, I'll make a new layer on top of the rough layer. I know already that what I'm dealing with here is two-point perspective. I can see that I'm going to have two vanishing points on either side of this drawing and a horizon line that's somewhere in the middle. I'm going to choose a red color for my grid lines and start to draw them out. Now the important thing to note about two-point perspective is that it's nearly always preferable to have your vanishing points way outside of your Canvas or your frame. If both of the vanishing points are inside the frame or inside the drawing, it really tends to warp the drawing because it's way too tight. What I'm doing here is I'm going to hit C on my keyboard. That brings up the crop tool. I'm going to drag the size of this crop out. Now I have a much longer Canvas drawing in the middle, and I got loads of room on either side for vanishing points. Next, I'm going to follow the general lines that are established in the drawing like this building on the left here, follow those lines that have already been mapped out. Now to draw a straight diagonal line in Photoshop, you need to tap on your starting point, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and tap on the end point of your line. This works best with a very round hard brush one of the default brushes. It tends to not really work that well with a texture brush because of the tapering effect that you have on texture brushes, makes the line imperceptible sometimes. What I often do is just simply draw a dead straight horizontal line, which seems to appear much stronger. Then I'll hit Command or Control T and simply use the free transform tool to rotate that line to the exact angle that I want. Then I can draw a straight horizontal line through here. That's my horizon line. Now I'm just going to complete the diagonals to the second vanishing point following on from this main house, this is like my basic unit for the perspective. As you can see, I'm being careful to match diagonal lines up with the left side of the drawing first. I think choose one thing in your drawing that you know is going to be that basic unit that you can measure against. You'll find that you can easily change the rest of the drawing to match rather than trying to make your perspective fit everything all at once. In other words, I'm getting my perspective as close as possible to the drawing. But I know that for example these buildings on the right, they're going to have to be adjusted in the next phase. But that's great, that's fine. That's what this process is all about. What I'm doing here is just mapping the grid on top of the rough drawing so that in the next iteration or the next pass, I can make a cleaned up version that's going to be matching these lines. Once you've got your simple grid established, you can hit C on your keyboard again and crop your drawing back into the original size. 15. Developing the Rough Sketch: The next step in this process is to develop this concept or this rough idea a little bit further now that we've got a more established perspective grid. What I'm going to do is lower down the opacity on both my rough drawing layer and the grid. Just click on the layer, bring the opacity down and then make sure to click this padlock icon to lock the layer so that you don't end up drawing on it by mistake. Then I'm going to make a new layer above it. But I want this layer to be below the grid and I'm going to lock that grid layer as well. Now it can start to get a little bit more interesting. I am going to basically draw over this entire drawing again. Still very rough and loose though. However, I'm going to give myself a little bit of leeway now to start adding in details and to refine some of the things that I want to develop. Just to note, this is not going to be the final part. I'm still going to have to go over this drawing maybe a third time again. But in this part, I want to really develop the sketch into something a little bit more concrete. Because I've got something to work on, it's actually a very easy process. I'm just tracing over this really rough drawing. Plus because I have the perspective lines, I know I can follow them and I can be sure that the drawing is going to start to become more structured. At this stage, I'm still drawing from memory. I'm not making any exact references yet per se. I just want to reiterate what I've been saying a lot, that is that this is still an intuitive and a free form approach to drawing. I find that to be a lot more fun, a lot more interesting way of creating backgrounds rather than right out of the gate having to be precise and detailed. You can be a lot more imaginative this way. Now you can see if I turn off the rough layer, how much better this is starting to look already. I've got the three houses here. They're much more defined, much more clearly expressed, and they're starting to look like actual houses. I'm going to go ahead with the boat in the background. But I've decided, I'm not really sure about these elements. I might not paint it up in the final iteration, but I'm going to draw this in any way. It could be an option for later on if I decide that it's necessary to have it. I'm going to leave it in if you want to add it in. If you're going to use this line drawing, let's say for your final background then let's see what you can come up with. Now, onto the right-hand side, remember, this is the side that doesn't have the correct perspective going on in the rough drawing. That's totally okay. What I'm going to do is work with what's here and adapt this to the grid lines to be more correct, let's say. Now, for the foreground area, I want to have the ground rise up in the very foreground plane here. I want to frame the scene. I'm going to put in on the side a big, I'm thinking like a pole or a structure of some kind, one of those monolithic looking things. I'm not sure what this is going to be actually just yet, but I need something that's going to balance out the rest of the composition, something very tall and imposing over here. I'm also going to stick in some fence posts. Again, these are going to work great as leading lines within the composition. They're going to be pointing inwards towards the center. I don't have to be very specific about them yet. Just put in some shapes. Over on this side, I did want to be specific. I want to have a skull on a post. Again, this notion of a very tall structure to give that sense of scale. I'm going to draw the post straight up and down first and then transform it with the transform tool and move it into place. Then up here, for now, I'll just draw a vague shape for a skull, an animals skull with long horns. That looks good. Then at the base, let's put in a shield, maybe some broken weapons, a sword or something, some arrows, something like that. Well, this is looking really good now. I feel that we're pretty much almost at that last stage for our layout drawing. I'm really happy with this. I'm happy how it turned out. I can tell you right now that all of the hard work it's done. The hard work is really always in how you compose your shot and how you get down on the page, what you've got in your mind. After that, it's just a matter of filling stuff in and being patient and committed to quite a long and laborious process sometimes. But this early initial stage is the most important stage. If you've gotten this far on your own drawing, well-done, it's a good chunk of the work completed. Even though this is still rough, our foundation for the background is here in this initial sketch. All I really need to do is make one more pass at this drawing and go at it with a more clean line. That's what I'm going to explain how to do in the next video. When you're ready, join me in the next lesson and we'll develop this towards a finished layout drawing. 16. Drawing Structure Part 1: In this lesson, I want to go over something that for me has been a bit of a standout issue with a lot of beginner background artists, a lot of beginner digital painters, and that is how they approach or draw a structure in their work. This is a really good place in the process to explain how to think about drawing structure. Because it really is the one standard thing that's going to make your drawing either look successful or not look successful and I'll explain exactly what I mean in this lesson. The first thing that I want to do, though, is just tidy up my layers a little bit. I've got things on different layers, which is fine because it actually gives me the leeway or the freedom to maybe move things around if I need to. I've got my foreground drawing on a different layer. So I think this is starting to look okay. What I can do now is group all of these layers together. Select them all by holding down Shift and then Command or Control G to put them into a group. Then what you can do is just double-click on the name of dash and type in. Let's type in rough drawing. You can also lower the opacity of the entire group down, which is handy. Now, what I want to point out is if I hop over to my reference or my mood board, I want to talk a little bit about how to really look for the structure in your work that's going to give that impression of realism. When you're drawing something as simple as the roof of a building, for example, what a lot of beginners do is simply just draw the outside shape. I want to encourage you to start to think about the things being in 3D. If you look at this image over here, there's this outside plane, but there's also an underneath side to it and there's even an area underneath that with these pillars and posts back there. Instead of just drawing a straightforward A frame, start to think about the edges of things and the 3D structure and if you can draw that, then your drawing is going to have much more solidity. It's going to look a lot more real and a lot more believable. If we go back to my drawing, you'll see I haven't got that in this drawing, really. I've just indicated a triangular shape for the roof, but now I want to come in and actually define the shape of that triangular roof. If I start up here at the top, let's say with the top of the roof here, I'm going to make sure that I'm drawing this with a sense of structure. There might be this plane here that we can see. But there's also a 3D aspect to this that I'm going to indicate. That is really going to give it the solid structure that I'm looking for in my line work. When I was starting out as a beginner as soon as I realized this one factor in my drawing, everything just improved so much. This I think along with that thing I was talking about of having confident line work those are the two things that if you're a beginner and you want to improve as an artist or improve as an illustrator focus on getting confident and strong line work and focus on drawing your 3D objects as clearly as you can really give expression to the object as it is in space, as you would see it. I really hope this makes sense. It's hard to explain and hopefully you're seeing what I mean in this drawing as I worked through it. You can see I'm not actually even being very precise at all, but I'm still drawing very rough and loose. But I am starting to really think about how these things are looking in a 3D sense. Even on this roof if I think at this stage it's going to be a straw roof, I'm still going to try and indicate the fact that it has a specific 3D quality to it. So down here, I'm going to indicate the bottom of the entire roof so that it feels very solid. It feels like a thick straw roof. At this stage, I'm going to keep going again. Here I want these pieces of timber that are going to be framing my doorway or framing the front of the house. I want to make sure that these look like they're solid, look like they have dimension and they're not just two flat lines. In other words, if I draw it out here like this, you can see that's just a flash shape. Whereas if I draw the side of it like this and give it a bit of perspective immediately, it's something that has that dimension that I'm talking about. You can put texture on if you want but I think this is much more important, is just drawing a little bit of structure in your work. It does take time and it might seem a bit laborious and I'm going to redo this drawing once more after this. You do need to have a bit of patience with the process. But I think if you're in this course with me, then you love background art, you love drawing, and you're going to enjoy doing this anyway. I also wanted to just make the point that be careful with your line weight. As you can see here, I've just drawn in these pillars on my house and the line is very heavy and I don't like that. I think you should be a little bit careful about your line weight because if your line is heavy and thick like this, it's going to really detract from the drawing overall and you don't really want to have very thick lines on your layout, especially if there's an area with a lot of detail. The way I'm keeping my line work light is I'm not really putting a huge amount of pressure on my tablet with my stylus. You can actually vary the pressure of your pen and that varies the line weight a lot. I'm trying to keep it quite light and not pressing down too heavily on my Wacom tablet. I'm going to turn off the rough layer and you can see how this house has come together so much like it's nearly completely finished, I would say. That is just one one pass after the very rough drawing. I'm going to continue to draw the structure. I'm going to continue to focus on making sure that I've got three-dimensionality in my drawing. I'm going to step-by-step methodically move through the whole rest of the drawing. I'll see you in the next video. 17. Drawing Structure Part 2: Welcome back. In this lesson, I'm going to continue my cleaned up version of my layout or at least maybe I think this might be the last part. It seems to be coming along fine. As you can see, I'm now working on the front of this house. I just want to finish off the steps. Again, talking about that three-dimensionality that we were talking about in the previous lesson. I'm making sure that these planks have structure and they feel like they're not just lines on the page, they actually feel very 3D and solid. I'm starting to put it in tiny details now of this to make sure that it reads properly. That's a support underneath the planks. Posts underneath the stair is supporting the platform in front of the door. Underneath here at the ground level is coming down. This is going to be all snow anyways, so I don't need to get many details in there, but now I want to draw the steps. The way I approach drawing steps, which can be tricky, especially in something like a two-point perspective, I always tend to think about the top plain of the step first. What I'll do is draw out the rectangle for the top of the step and then draw the sides of it down like this. Now, I'll just draw in a few posts at the back there that are going to be supporting these steps. Then I'll draw my second one. You can see if I turn off the rough drawing, it looks fine. It's probably not, from an engineering perspective, the most [LAUGHTER] stable of steps, but I think for this drawing, that works really well. At least, as I said, it looks like it's a solid structure. Now, in this second house back here, I have in mind quite a complex shape for the two posts that are supporting the roof. I want them to be in the shape of a carved dog or wolf or hound of some kind. If I draw it in a regular side on view, just to show you what I mean, it's going to look a little bit like this. Drawing it roughly out like this is helping me to visualize the shape of it. This is going to be the wolf's head and the jaws open like this. The idea is that this is a very roughly hewn wooden turrity, or I don't know what you would call it, a gargoyle type of a thing, but I still want it to read clearly. It's going to look like that, but it's going to be angled up and [LAUGHTER] it's going to be in two-point perspective, which sounds really difficult to do, but I think it's going to be easy. That works. It's going to read as a wolf's head that's been carved into a plank of wood. Put it that way. [LAUGHTER] I'm trying to think in terms of blocks that are built on top of each other. If you can visualize that, it goes a long way to helping you draw it. Then I'll just fly through the rest of the house. You don't have to watch me do it step-by-step, I don't think. Then this is going to be my straw roof coming down. This roof goes all the way to the ground. Just to vary up the shape of the houses, a good tip is to try and have contrast and variance in your designs so it's not all the same. Each house is slightly different. That's going to make your drawing or make your layout or your background look very interesting and visually pleasing. Here are the steps. Again, I'm changing up the steps for this one. I don't want it to be the exact same as the previous house, but I'm approaching it in the exact same way. Draw each of the steps by drawing the top plane first and then giving it that structure for the sides. 18. Drawing Organic Shapes: Moving on. In this background, it's more of the same. As I said, it's a quite a process to move through a drawing like this. But you're just tracing things over and adding those smaller details as you go. It can be a fun process. You can just sort on music and listen to music while you work and just take your time. What I would say throughout this process is don't rush it. If you feel that you're rushing it you may start to make mistakes or you may start to skip over things and also take some breaks. I mean, you can get really tired really quickly doing work like this. I certainly got really tired by the end of this process and I could see that by the time I got to the last house or the last part of the drawing I was starting to leave things out and starting to take shortcuts in the process. Take breaks as often as you can. This layout drawing shouldn't take you days and days. It'll just give it the time that it needs. It depends on your own speed of course. But make sure that you take breaks and that you can move through it step by step. At this stage it is coming together. I feel like at the very least, definitely the composition is finished or the composition is completely resolved, it's completely working. I'm really happy about that. I think that the details are starting to work very, very nicely. I was a bit worried that this drawing might be too detailed and difficult to figure out like in terms of scale. But I think, no, I think it is starting to be cohesive. I just wanted to mention when it comes to, after all of this detailed structural and let's say architectural style drawing, when it comes to drawing something like organic shapes you can be a lot more freer and a lot more stylized if you like, especially on a background like this. For example trees in the background. I'm literally just drawing in these triangular shapes. That's all you need to do to indicate like an entire forest. Same with the mountain, I'm not going to do anything detailed. I'm just literally drawing in these shapes like this. If this were any other kind of a background with a forest that was slightly different I would just make sure that the trees stayed as loose and organic as possible because it's going to contrast very nicely and work really well with all of the structures that are in place in the middle to foreground. Again, that comes back to this principle of having contrast in your backgrounds or in your designs. If the focus of your painting is kind of man made structures, then try to balance that out with some very loosely free form organic shapes. That's the end of that. I think we're nearly at the very end of this process. All I'm going to do next is work on the foreground. I'm going to talk in the next video about the importance between separating out the planes of your background into a foreground, mid-ground, and the background. When you're ready meet me in the next lesson. 19. Draw FG, MG. BG: In this lesson, I'm going to work on the foreground elements of this painting. I want to explain how you should try to keep three distinct planes in your background very clear. Those different planes or sections of your painting are the foreground, the midground, and then the fore background. If I go back into my rough drawing, you can see that I started in the rough phase already making the foreground elements on a separate layer. I'm going to now spend some time to work over these. While I do that, I'm just going to explain why you put foreground elements like this on a separate layer. The main reason is that in animation, it's likely that you want to have these structure or these elements to be above the characters. In other words, if a character is in this scene, they may possibly need to walk on screen from left to right, and you don't want them to be walking over your foreground elements. You keep all of these foreground elements on a new layer or on a separate layer, so that when it goes to the editing phase or the compositing phase, the editor could then take that layer and place it above the animation and still have the animation itself be above the background layer, if that makes sense. That's why it's really good to always put your foreground elements on their own separate distinct layer or even in their own group. You'll see by the time we get to the painting phase, we're going to have layers upon layers but at least it'll be grouped out, and at the end of the day, you can simply flak in that group into one layer. Another thing that is often done in animation is if this is an establishing shot, it's very common to have what's called a camera move on a shot like this. There might be a really small zoom into the scene or a shock in. The way that that's done in animation is to have these foreground elements zoom up at a different rate to the background. It gives the effect that the camera is moving into the scene. Again, that can only be achieved if your foreground elements are on a separate layer. Then behind the foreground is going to be what's called your midground, and that's the ground plane, that's the houses. That's where the main action of the animation is going to be taking place. Behind that is a section of your painting that we will call the background. That's basically just the sky. In this case the mountain range possibly. I think the forest and this would probably be included in the mid ground, so in that case, it would just be the sky in the background. Again, that can be manipulated in post or manipulated in the compositing phase, if it's separate and distinct from the rest of the layers in the overall background. Again, all of this is going to be clear as mud by the time we get to the actual painting phase and when we start to create layers, it'll all make sense then. But right now, even in the drawing phase, I wanted to make sure that you can start to understand your entire background in terms of these three distinct planes, your foreground, your midground, and your background. I'm finishing up here. I'm not 100% sure what this totem pole type of structure is on the right here. It's a little bit like one of those vague elements that I sometimes put in when I've got a an idea of what this should be, but I'm not 100% sure. At this stage, I'll just keep going with this. I know I need to have a big tall element on the right here to balance out the scale and to really frame this entire scene. It may or may not have all of this detailing by the time we get to painting, but I think that looks good for now. 20. How to Start the Painting Process: In this lesson, we're going to move into painting and adding color. What I'm going to do is I think I can get rid of this rough drawing. I'm just going to delete that group altogether. This is my final drawing. I'm going to bring the opacity down on that layer and I'm going to lock it. Then I'm going to create a new layer above this, because the first thing that I want to do is choose some colors. If you've been in my other background painting courses, then you'll know that I like to focus on a limited palette. What I've got here are just a few colors that I think are going to work for the image that I have in mind. I'm going to keep them on a separate layer and use them as my starting point. Now these colors may change as I move through. But one of the reasons why it's so important to limit yourself to [LAUGHTER] a small number of colors at the beginning is because A, it takes away the overwhelm. It takes away that feeling of where do you start. B, it helps you to relate your color choices to an existing scheme, which will mean that you'll have a more cohesive look overall. In other words, you're not randomly choosing colors. It's just really helpful. It's also a very efficient way of moving through what can be quite long and laborious process. The first thing that I want to do is put down a sky color. I'm going to grab my Marquee tool, making sure it's the square or rectangular marquee and just click out an area. The next thing I'm going to do is I want to create some shapes for the foreground area. I'm going to do that with the Pen tool. You can hit "P" on your keyboard, click and drag out your points. As you can see, when I do that, I've got this really big black line go up here to where it says, Fill, change that to the color that I want. Where it says Stroke, make sure that it's turned off like that. That will ensure that I just have the color filled in here and not any outline. I'm going to make three big round shapes at the frontier. I might just ever so slightly vary up the tone with a hue to ensure that they look distinct and separate. The third one there. Again, double-click into the icon and just change the color if you want to. Change any color of your vector shape. Above my sky layer, I'm now going to use my Polygon Lasso tool, and I'm going to just start to trace out this ground plane. There's what looks like rocks at the background there. The rest just comes down here like this. I've got a new layer above my sky layer, and I'll just fill it with that color. I've got my sky, my ground plane, and my three shapes in the foreground. For the next section or the next phase of this painting, I want to block in flat colors. It's really important to get your blocks of colors down before you start adding textures, because that's the basis for your painting. It's going to be a matter of just going in diligently tracing over each of the main shapes in the background. Those are going to be the houses on the left, the houses on the right, the foreground elements, the forest, and the mountains. We're going to take it step-by-step. What I tend to do is use the Lasso tool, but if you want, you can also use the Pen tool as well. Then just start to carve out the overall silhouette. I'm not going into details or I'm not trying to draw anything else in here. I'm just carving out a basic silhouette of the house because I want to fill that with a flat color. I'm now going to choose a dark brown color and fill it. Now for the top element of this house, because there's big curves on it, I want to use the Pen tool. It's a lot easier to make curved shapes with the Pen tool plus using the pen, it automatically fills the colors for you. It's up to you if you want to continue to work with the Pen tool throughout the process. I tend to use both the Pen and the Lasso tool. But for shapes like this, for curved shapes where you want it to be quite precise, then definitely use the Pen tool. That looks good. If you wanted to go in and change it, you can tweak these vector points. Just hold down Option or Alt on your keyboard. Select the vector point and move it about if you need to. I'm going to right-click on that and then come down to where it says rasterize layer. Now that's rasterize and then I'll merge it down to my house layer. That's now all on one layer. I'm going to double-click into the name of the layer and call this left house 1. Then I'm going to move on to the next one. What you can do is create a few shapes and then merge them together. I think that's easier on this house, especially with these complex shapes. I think it's easier to do them one at a time. I'm going to just trace out this carved wolf's head [LAUGHTER] with the Pen tool and then I can merge it back down when I need to. As I mentioned, this process can be very time consuming and a little bit laborious [LAUGHTER], and maybe even a little bit tedious. But I think it's very necessary to go through this. I don't know if there's that many shortcuts or if you even need to rush this process. It's all part of the painting at the end of the day. All of this work is going to create a very rich looking background. Just keep going with it and take it step-by-step as I keep saying, take lots of breaks. Make sure that you don't get tired of this too quickly or too easily. There's not much to point out in terms of technique or tips at this stage. All I'm doing is making sure that my colors stay in a cohesive register and that they are slightly differentiated between each of the structures because I don't want each of these houses to be the exact same. That's the only thing I'm doing is really just varying the colors ever so slightly. I'm making a lot of use of the Pen tool because it's handy that the color is already set while you're creating the shape. I'm just following the under-drawing as closely as possible and tracing it out. If you can get through all of that, then that's great. I've got all the houses done. Now that they're all on their own layers, and their own distinct shapes, I can even move them around if I need to and change up the composition. 21. Flat Colours for Complex Shapes: In this lesson, I'm going to finalize the flat colors for the composition. I want to move through the foreground elements, as well as the mountains in the background. Again, continuing the process and using the pen tool as much as possible and then rasterizing or converting that layer from a vector shape into a normal painting layer. The reason that I do that is just to ensure that I can paint on that layer later on. You can't actually paint directly onto a vector layer so I always like to right-click and convert it to a rasterized layer. In the foreground here, when it comes to creating the shape for this shield, I want to show you how I would approach it and that is to grab the Elliptical Marquee Tool, which is the second one down, hold Shift on your keyboard and that allows you to create a perfect circle. Then on a new layer, I'm going to fill that with a color, hit Command or Control T to skew it. Let me move it into place and then I can manipulate the edges. I'm holding down Option or Alt on your keyboard, now I want to actually duplicate the layer. If you click onto the layer where that shape is and hit Command or Control plus J on your keyboard that will duplicate the layer. Now I've got two of the exact same shapes, if you click into the little thumbnail icon of the layer, it will select that the entire shape and click into there like that, maybe a bit darker. My top layer is this gray color but if I click on the underneath layer, I'm going to nudge that layer out and you can see that's like a very quick and easy way to make around 3D shape. With my lasso tool, I'm going to come in and like drawing this again but just using the Lasso tool. I'm going to draw it out and then I'm going to hit Backspace, which deletes that color and that's from the top layer. Then I'm going to go to the underneath layer and carve out like another ***** or another chunk that's missing and then with the Lasso tool, I'm going to start to draw out the skull. Now the way that you can work with the Lasso tool is while you're in the polygon lasso, if you hold down Option or Alt on your keyboard, you can toggle between that and the regular lasso, which means you can make straight lines as well as curved lines and it's a really handy workflow. I'm doing that to just trace out the shape and then just I'm going to fill that with a color and then for the horns, I'm going to switch over to the pen tool and make sure that I get those curves. These little items, again, going to use the Lasso tool and trace them out and I don't need to do anything too complicated that can be quite stylized. Moving on to the right side, I had initially thought these were going to be a fence but I think I'm going to leave them as just generic stakes in the ground, like stakes of timber or something like dash and fill all of them with the same color. Now what I'm going to do is try and tidy up my layers before I go any further. I'm going to group that layer and I'm going to name this right OL and you can see I've named the left side, left OL. OL means, it's an animation term, it means overlay and it's the term that's used for items that are going to essentially be overlaid on top of the animation. Remember how I mentioned in the previous video, when you're keeping your foreground distinct from your mid ground and your background, that's going to help the animators or give the freedom for the animators to have characters walking behind these foreground elements. What I'm also doing here is once I've got everything grouped, I'm actually going to separate them out into these three distinct sections. This is a very good and very common practice as well, I'm going to make one large group for the foreground, the midground, and the background and then within each of those folders or sub folders that contain layers. 22. Testing Snow Textures: Believe it or not, we have finished our flat colors. We've got to the end of that part of the process, and I will admit to that does take a bit of time, and a bit of patience to get through it. But it's done now, and the next phase of the project can get a lot more exciting, and interesting when we start to add textures and details. I wanted to show you how to adjust the values on your composition at this early stage. But before I do that, I've decided to add in some snow on the ground, because I think I just want to start to test out how this is going to look with some texture brushes. I'm sure you're probably a little bit tired of the flat color phase. I thought let's just dive in and add some snow on the ground and play around with some textures just to do almost like a test run, and see how we get on with that. On a new layer, I'm going to dive into some of these texture brushes. This is really a chance to experiment, there's no hard and fast rule about what brush to use for what texture you want to create. It really is up to you, so play around with these brushes, and start to experiment, and get comfortable. Try and understand what each of the texture brushes can offer. I'm literally just painting in with maybe one or two of these texture brushes, just to get this feeling of snow. I think it's working. In the foreground, what I'm going to do is make sure that I create layers above the shapes. That way I can change up either the underlying color of the shapes or I can change up the color or value of the texture itself. It's always good to try and keep your texture separate, to the underlying shape. Eventually, you'll figure out, a brush that you really like, and a brush that works for you. That looks good. I think this is going to look really nice, once all of the textures are added, I'm very happy to see this. In the next lesson, let's talk about values, and how to ensure that your painting is going to read really strong and clear in terms of values. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 23. Adjusting Values and Adding Sky: If I were to pinpoint or highlight two of the main areas where I see beginners struggling with, it would be in the areas of value and in the areas of textures. You can have a really nicely composed composition, you can have a lot of detail and a really strong sense of story, but if the values are wrong and they don't quite work well together, it can really let that composition or let that background painting down. The other area of textures, I'm going to explain a bit more when we get into it. But in this lesson, I wanted to show you how to adjust your values, how to make sure that your values read very clearly. Values refers to the contrast within your painting. Elements within the foreground have higher contrast and elements in the background will have less contrast. Sometimes it does depend on the specific lighting setup that you've got going on, but that's a really good guideline. Here's a really handy, a very quick way to adjust the values in your painting. If you select a layer and hit Command or Control U, it brings up this dialogue box, this hue saturation dialogue. From here, these sliders are very useful. If you drag the saturation slider for example, you can adjust the saturation, you can drag the lightness or brightness of the layer as well. It's a really quick and easy way to adjust the values. I'm going to make this much darker. That looks better. All these elements in the front should be a little bit darker so I'm dragging the slider down on all of them just to make them sit in the background and be much more dramatic. It's much easier to change the value than it is to change the hue in my opinion, so I would make sure that the base color, you're happy enough with dash and then just work with lightness and saturation. The sky needs to be a much lighter. But what I'm going to do now is create a new layer above it. This is a big soft round brush, one of the default Photoshop brushes and I'm just going to add in this very light tone across the bottom of the sky. That's great, that's giving you that sense of gradient on the sky. I can even maybe darken it up along the top. But even that slight adjustment has made a huge difference to the painting overall. It's immediately given it a sense of depth. Staying with the sky, I think I'm going to add another layer, give it a bit of a glow because I want the sun to be rising here and have this be like a dawn sky with a beautiful sunrise glowing just over the horizon, so I'm going to give a hint of dash. This is all done with a very soft round brush and very lightly. You don't have to be too heavy handed with this effect. You can just really just give a very subtle touch. In fact, this is one of those cases where less is more so I might even just leave it at that and not do anymore. I like the way the clouds look. One thing I might do like I did with the forest though, is stylize the clouds a little bit, grab the Lasso tool and just draw a very simple shape like this. Then with the brush tool, and we're just going to brush on the very edge of my selection. If I do select, you can see that that creates a nice stylized edge to it. I'm literally just brushing on the edge just to give it that definition in the sky. We are now ready for the final phase of this background painting, which is going to be the texture phase. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson and we're going to dive into how to apply actual, realistic-looking textures to things like these timber cabins and things like dash. 24. Painting Light and Shadow: In this lesson, what I want to do is change up the snow on the ground before going any further. That was a bit of an experiment to see how my textures are going to work and I'm happy enough with that but I don't think that the snow layer is working as a snow layer. I'm going to delete it. I want to draw a shape out again, in quite a stylized way, the same way that I did the clouds and the previous lesson. Command or Control shift into that layer. I'm going to create a new layer underneath and then in here I can start to paint my snow. I'm going to create shadows using the lasso tool and just carving up shadows underneath with a soft round brush. I'll make sure that I'm painting nice soft color underneath into those selections. Then I can do the same on this side. Once I've got everything on one layer, I'm now going to switch over to my texture brush and I liked that round bristle brush. I'm going to grab that and just pay, break up the edges here ever so slightly to make it look a little bit more painterly and not so I want to make sure that those edges aren't really hard and defined. The next thing is, I have now decided that I'm going to add snow onto the roof of these houses. I want to use the pen tool again to do this. I want to follow the shape of the house or follow the shape of the roof underneath and make sure give it that feeling that it's very obvious or it's a very iconic look in an animation like I say Klaus if you've seen that movie where the snow on the roof of these real very stylized sections of snow. Almost. Now that it's starting to look very different, I really love the snow and the roofs. I think this is a much better idea than having them just be straw roof. It's looking really good. Like I said about structure in detail. I don't want the snow to be just flat like a flash sheet. I want it to have dimension. What I'm going to do is rasterize the layer and then go in with my Lasso tool and select the edge of it. This is the edge that I want to have, us, facing the light a little bit and then I'm going to hit Command or Control+M on my keyboard, and that brings up the curves editor. This is a fabulous tool to use. If you want to quickly change the value or the change the color, you can use the hue saturation slider. This is just another one. Just push this curve up and you'll see on my painting that the selection goes much lighter. Let me just run through the rest of the pieces of snow and give them that little bit of extra depth and extra dimension and that works amazing, that has a fantastic effect and it's so simple, so quick to do. 25. Finalizing the Forest: In this lesson, I wanted to point out the difference between using something like a stamped brush for, let's say the forest versus drawing trees individually. I'm going to make a layer at the bottom here, and I'm just going to pull up the relevant brush that I wanted to show you. It's in your landscape brushes and it's called Spruce Forest and you can immediately see that the brush itself is a picture of a bunch of trees. You would be tempted to make your entire forest out of this. But what I wanted to point out is that for the most part, we're going for quite a stylized image and something like this kind of a stamped brush where it really is a silhouette of an actual picture of a tree. It's going to stand out hugely if you just use that, for what you can do is use something like this in conjunction with your stylization and I would recommend using this as a background to give the feeling of a forest receding off towards that far away mountain and you can create that with literally two types of your stylus. You've created a whole forest. I also decided that my forest needs a lot more variation. It's a bit flat and bland and uninteresting. I'm going to go for a third type of tree. I'm going to draw it out with my lasso tool just like this. Select this. Let me pull it out into the front here. You can see it much better. This is going to contrast hugely with the existing trees by having it be much more skinnier with these distinct branches, it's really going to stand out compared to the other trees. I want to add snow onto this tree. Essentially, with the lasso tool, I'm going to draw, what I would imagine is, build-up of snow on each of these branches. I'm doing it on the same layer as the tree itself so I don't have to use a clipping mask. It'll just fill to the edge of the tree of the existing drawing underneath. 26. Painting Textures Part 1: Looking at this piece now, I know that there is going to be a lot of work that will be needed to create the timbre texture on the houses. I'm going to show you my method of making these textures, which is essentially to hand paint each one rather than to just blanketly use a brush texture over everything. It's a little bit more detailed and a bit more time-consuming, but it will have a much richer effect this way. What I'm going to do is, first of all, in my layer stack, I want to highlight the layer that my base color is on so that I know that I don't paint on it. To do that, you just right-click and add a color to that layer. Then I'm going to aim as much as I can to paint my textures on top of this. The reason I do this is in case it doesn't work out or in case I want to change my textures or even change the base color later on. I'm following the drawing since I think the drawing is clear and it's probably going to be a very good guide. Essentially, the process is this: I will make a selection with the Lasso tool, grab a texture brush, and then paint over with a slightly varied tone. Something slightly different to the base color, maybe a little bit darker or a little bit lighter. Now a couple of points to note throughout this process. First, it will take some experimentation to find the right texture brush. Personally, I started out trying a few different texture brushes and then I settled by the end of the process on just two specific brushes, the wood grain and the round bristle. The other point that I want to make throughout this process is that you can go ahead and make your selections for each of these timber planks all at once, but the texture might not look like it's on the individual planks if you do that. What I want to try and achieve is to make them look like they are separate, distinct planks of wood. So if you find that you're painting your textures on and it just looks a bit monotone, try to do the planks one by one. At times, you can also change up the color. You don't always have to be working in browns, for example, you can add in a highlight or contrasting color just here and there that will really make it pop. Then the next step, once I've made the individual planks, I want to add in really thin strips of dark color. This element is called, or the technical term is an occlusion shadow. An occlusion shadow is where two edges of an object mesh. I want to put that in, it's really important to have that element. For that, I'm just going to use the paint bucket tool and tap into the selection. Great. Now I'm going to use the exact same method to add the beams that go across this wooden base. I've got this long support beam here that I want to indicate it's rounded. Adding in this texture, I'm also considering the fall of light along the top. Since it's protruding out of the rest of the house at the front I want it to catch the light. I'm adding in lighter color along the top and a little bit of a darker color along the bottom. On the top section of the house these beams also need to have that same sense of dimension since they are on top of the base. I'm going to make sure to give that consideration, make the darker shadow of be on the left to make them look like they're sturdy and weighty and sticking out from the house. That's the front of the house, more or less done. If I zoom out, you can immediately see the effect. It does take a bit of time and a bit of patience but it's really worth it, and you can have a realistic, or at least a believable looking structure, from just really a simple process of selecting with the Lasso tool and adding texture with a texture brush. The last point that I do want to make in this lesson before moving on to the next one, is that when you get down to the base of the house where the structure meets the ground, and this can be applied to any building that you're painting, always give some thought to how those structures or buildings meet the ground, what the edges are, or the transition. In other words, I don't want to have just the house floating on top of the snow. I'm going to paint in some marks to indicate that rough transition and paint some snow coming up onto the base and that's going to just look a lot better. In the next lesson, I will continue on with painting up these textures. When you're ready, meet me there. 27. Painting Textures Part 2: Since all the houses are in the same material, i.e, they're all wooden timber structures. You guessed it, it's the exact same process all the way around. I just want to point out again that you don't have to be too heavy-handed with these textures by the way. That's why I have a base of flat color underneath. Because you want to have the texture be a little bit subtle and have it sitting on top of the base color and have that base color come through slightly. The textures really only need to be indicated lightly. Too much of it is going to start to look jarring. That's also why it's a good idea to have just two or three brushes that you use and not have loads of varying textures on the one surface material, in this case, the timber houses. Having said that though, throughout the painting as a whole, you do want to be careful, or mindful, I should say, about adding varying or different types of textures. Don't paint the exact same texture or use the exact same brush on absolutely everything. It's really nice to have a cohesive and overall look. But try to to about how you can have areas within your painting that have different textures. If you do use the same brush, for example, at the very least change up your brush strokes as you move from the foreground back to the mid-ground, and even back to the very far background. Make your brush marks smaller as you move away and make the brush size smaller as you move through the painting. This painting is grayish because the snow actually really adds that contrast between the very detailed wooden structures with a lot of very specific small textures, a contrast with the soft white snow on the roof. I really liked that variation. The same can be said for the trees in the background. Keeping them flat and stylized really works to add that visual contrast, and that's something that you really want to have in any painting. I've seen this a lot in beginners' work where you got a really nice composition, everything's working great, but the brushstrokes and the textures are the exact same throughout the entire painting. It makes things very, very flat. With that in mind, when I start on the straw texture, I'm actually going to switch it up completely, and I'm going to now draw in just very simple lines with a hard round brush and that's it. I could go and find a texture brush for straw, but I feel that this effect stands out a lot better because it's so simpler. Against the timber it really works, and against the snow it's nice. It's realistic and it's very quick and easy to just hand draw these few lines to indicate it. 28. Painting Details to Add Richness: In this lesson, I'm going to add the house shields onto the houses and start to add a little bit more detail. To make a shield, I'm going to click and drag out a perfect circle, make it a dark color, and then use the free transform tool to skew it and move it into place. Then on top of that, I will duplicate the layer. I've now got two layers the same. I'm going to scale this one down and I want to make this one slightly lusher color, so it gives it that sense that it's got like a metal part on top. Then I'll merge these two layers together by just selecting them, right-click and choose Merge Layers. To add the details, again, I'm going to opt to just paint them in by hand. I'm not going to go into overkill with the details on this shield. Because this shield is actually going to be so small when you zoom out, you won't really see any small details that you work on. I'm just going to quickly add in these beveled bits here and there to make it look shield like. Underneath the shield, I'll add in a cross, maybe there's some armor underneath or two swords crossed. Now the last detail on this house is going to be the skull, and I'll draw it out with the Lasso tool. Then I'll do my usual procedure, add in some flat color and use a small round brush to just mark in some details. Just to repeat myself again, this is going to be seen from far away so no massive details here. If you put into many details, they won't really read very well. Now all of these elements that you start to add on, on top of your design or on top of your painting, you can easily duplicate them and use them throughout, you don't have to draw everything from scratch, you don't have to redo each and every element individually. But I just want to make two comments about that, if you are duplicating elements. The first is make sure that you keep your layers organized. If you duplicate, for example, the shield from one house to place it onto another one, then make sure that you drag that layer in your stack over to the other house or put it in that group. It's going to make life a lot easier later on. If you keep everything organized as you go, instead of having a load of layers and they're not really grouped together. Then the second point to make is when you do duplicate something, just be sure to change up the duplicated element ever so slightly. Add something small to it or delete something out of it, rotate it or flip it. Just make sure that you make some small change so it doesn't stand out as being the exact same. If two things are the exact same in your painting, they will stand out. It'll be quite obvious. Just make any small change that you like and that'll work perfectly. 29. Painting the Foreground Elements: Painting the foreground elements now is really the second last phase of this entire process. Once I've painted up these foreground elements, the last phase is just a matter of adding final touches. This really is starting to come together as a background and it's looking great. I'm excited to get through these foreground elements and finish up this painting. I can now start to be a little bit more detailed and a little bit more varied here in the foreground because these elements are so close to the viewer that you want to actually bring out some of those details. For example, I think I want to add a slight bit of color here. Nothing jarring, but really something that's going to give a bit of contrast. So maybe adding this pinkish or reddish tone on the shield. That might work really well. There's so much blue, so many cool colors throughout the entire painting that here in the foreground, this one slight touch might work really well. I will be adding a little bit more saturation into the sky in the final touches phase. That's in the next lesson, but for now, I just want to keep colors and hues quite subtle. For small details like the sword, I'm going to use again, a small round brush and just very basically adding the handle and give it that dimension that I was talking about that three-dimensionality. If you want to emphasize the sword or you can go ahead and put a lot more details in. For me. I actually want the sword here just to be more of a silhouette than anything else. Now the skull is an opportunity to paint a lovely hint of highlight around the edges so that it looks like it's catching the light because it's so high up and so tall. That's going to be really nice. Seems like it would be catching the sunlight as the sun comes up over the horizon. I'll keep the back of the skull in a very dark color because that's going to be in shadow. Over on the right-hand side, now these posts can also have a hint of light on the tops. They're just catching the light a little bit. Again, these are silhouetted random shapes. They are going to work very well, as I said previously, for creating leading lines that point into the composition, into the focal area in the middle, but that's all they don't have to be overly detailed. It's just to give that impression of posts sticking up out of the snow. On the pillar, I'm going to imagine that it's facing the light on this side and I'll add in a lighter color like that. This is going to be a wooden structure. I'm using the exact same techniques and process that I did on the houses using the same selection and texture brush process. The only thing to note here is that I'm using a clipping mask with the texture and that is just simply allowing me to be able to paint outside of the edge and have it not show up because it's clipped to the shape underneath. Now the last detail is to add a layer above these elements and on that layer, I want to make it look like the snow is building up at the base. Again, this is what I was saying about with the houses. You want to be mindful about how things are sitting on the ground and how you can indicate that by roughening up the edges around the base of these items. That's it. I think this looks amazing. I can't believe we're here. We're nearly at the end of this very long process. This is very exciting to see. Let's get into the last lesson and let's finish off this painting with the final touches and give it that final rendered look. 30. The Final Pass: As I've been saying all along, using subtle textures and varying up your marks is much more effective than using over-the-top heavy-handed textures and using the same brush stroke all the way throughout your painting. I want you to think about that for this last step. I'm going to go ahead now and just add a hint of light throughout this painting. But I want to be really subtle about this. I'm going to add a sunrise glow in the back. But it has to be quite a light touch, nothing heavy. What I'm going to do is add a new layer, and then with a very simple default brush, the big soft round brush, I'm going to add the slightest touch of color. Literally that's all, I want to add more. I would love to go a bit wild with this sunrise sky, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to rein it in and just leave it at that. I think that's enough. Next up, I'm going to select the shape of the mountain and I want to add some random textures and also give it a bit more of that soft glow color. What this is doing is it's giving that all important atmospheric perspective. What I mean by that is that the idea or the concept that things which are further away have more air or more sky in-between them, in-between you and them and so they have much less contrast and much less saturation. My very last touch now is going to be just one sweep of texture across the middle ground, just like that and I think I am going to step back for the moment and just leave this painting now. I think that's it. I'm going to actually let you continue with this if you like. I would love to see your final painting and I'd love to see if you add any more elements from here on out. I mean, you could go ahead and add in the boat that we did in the layout drawing. You can put that in and paint it up, or you could even add in extra weapons, maybe something like a wagon or a cart. There's a lot of things that you could still add in and I'd love to now hand it over to you and see what you can come up with them, what you can paint based on all of the steps and the process that we've covered so far. When you're ready, please post your finished work into the project section or the Q&A section so that we can all be inspired by your vision. I really hope that you learned a lot in this class. I want to thank you for taking this journey with me. I'm honored to offer you my perspective really on things. I really sincerely hope that this helps you in your art career and that one day soon, you can show your portfolio to an animation studio and get hired as a background artist. That will be amazing. Please stay in touch with me, send me a message and let me know how you get on and always know that I'm here to answer any questions that you have. Thanks again for being here and thanks for your contribution to this class. I will look out for you in the project section and I hope to see you in the next class as well.