Art Journal 004: Backgrounds

This week’s journal post is going to be a bit more visual-oriented than the others.  I’ve been choosing what to talk about based on what state my comic happens to be in every Thursday- assuming I haven’t been working on other non-NDA projects that week too- and this Thursday I happened to be working on backgrounds, the underappreciated underdog of underground comics.

The presence of a background from one scene to the next serves to give the characters in a sequential narrative a sense of environment, creating a space for them to occupy with a trackable degree of permanence.  It gives a grounded sense of position- so, for example, you can tell if a character is turning their body from frame to frame or if the camera is rotating around a stationary subject- and provides the lighting and perspective to set the right mood for your scene.  It’s perfectly fine to imply your backgrounds and not render every little detail, but as a personal preference I like to give every panel on every page a fully realized background; I like to treat the world itself as a character and add it as a supporting cast member to prop up the others.

In traditional painting you’re supposed to paint your backgrounds first.  The purpose of this in illustration is to “kill the white”, a term referring to the state of a blank canvas.  Whenever you’re working with color or value your eyes will read colors differently depending on their context, and a pure-white canvas has a powerful skewing effect on your color choices.  White is a very bright, hot color; every color looks dark next to a white, so if you’re painting a figure with midtones, shadows and highlights all of your color balance is going to be scaled against an ocean of bright hot white all around it, and this can easily lead to too-dark color choices.  By painting your backgrounds first, you neutralize this overwhelming brightness so when you get to painting your subjects you have a proper context to choose your colors from, and your highlights can actually pop.  Traditionally you should do your backgrounds first because of the way paint layers, but since I work digitally I like to cheat and lay down a neutral tone first, paint my characters and then build the world around them so I can make sure they’re the central focus.

Every page starts with a sketch layer, and as in previous entries that sketch often has a very basic rendering of the background, just enough to give me a sense of where I want the camera to be.  Before I illustrate my main subjects I’ll preserve a copy of my sketch layer to put overtop of my background value- since I can mask out the sketch parts where the characters were I can preserve all the marks and notes I made in the early phases for when I reach the later ones.  Keeping them on a separate layer, the first thing I’ll do it block in where I want my major shapes to be- in today’s example my first task for this panel was to define the back wall from the ceiling, describe the 90 degree angle of the front counter and the depth of space in front of it, and then block in the pool table on the right.  The notes I make on my backgrounds are never set in stone- in my sketches I put the arcade machine on the immediate right of the counter window but when I looked back at earlier pages for reference (pp. 511 and 512) I remembered that the arcade machine is actually to the left of the kitchen door (so you can lead the power cord to it easily) and it was the pool cue rack that went to the right of the counter, so I did a quick all-black block-in of the items to define their space.  

In my early comics I used to use a Photoshop blur filter to create a forced depth of field in my panels- by making the backgrounds blurry it forces the eye into the foreground and by blurring the foreground we force the reader to look past our subjects to the background.  I wanted to move away from relying on program filters and do things organically so one trick I learned was to paint my backgrounds in a slightly different style to make them less sharply-defined from the foreground, thus giving my main subjects their due focus.  I’ve been using this trick for hundreds of pages- basically what I’ll do for non-important or non-focal background figures is I’ll block in a silhouette and then free-paint their features without any inking or sketchwork, giving them a slightly less-defined appearance.  This is also my shortcut to doing hordes of bodies, since I can block in a huge mass, paint in the features that stand out from the shadow and then paint in bits of ground or background between their legs to fit them in with the background.  When I’m actually doing my backgrounds this isn’t just a way to control reader focus, it’s a big time-saver!

After I block in my major shapes I go in and begin to refine them, adding new shapes and defining my shadows more clearly.  “Start big, work small” is the mantra here- you don’t want to dive right into fine details until you have your broader shapes blocked in, just like you don’t want to add icing until you’ve baked the bread of your cake first.  When I’m defining my shapes I like to use a brush where stylus pressure controls opacity so I can select a lighter or darker color and use variable pressure to create a weathered, mottled effect.  I don’t like plain stark white walls, there’s no character to them, so if it isn’t a grimy, aged wall I’ll at least try to use brushstrokes to imply actual-brushstrokes in a more pristine coat of paint.  I’ll often start with a mid-tone value and mottle towards the highlight, since there’s a noticeable depthening effect in putting lights on your midtone rather than painting mid- and dark-tones over your lights!  In old painting technique terms this meant the actual physical act of layering lighter paint on top of darker paint implied a greater sense of depth and dimension, but the same effect is seen when you work digitally too!  It’s just a matter of light brushstrokes noticeably fading into darker values rather than the other way around.

Once you’ve done the bulk of building your major and minor shapes you can start adding details!  Tiny cracks, imperfections, little items pinned or scattered all give an environment a sense of having been lived in.  The way items are arranged or scattered can even tell a story in itself, one that isn’t necessarily vital to your core narrative but a keen-eyed reader can still piece together.  “Oh, something must have happened here!”  It makes the world feel more alive and less like its just an illustration, and the way I see it you’re using that space already, you might as well make the most of it!  I’ve written all sorts of side-stories into different backgrounds of different scenes; if a reader doesn’t pick up on them then it isn’t a detriment to the narrative but if they do then it’s an extra little reward!  In addition to these little story items, this is a good time to make sure your shadows are correct for your light source.  I love shadows, everyone casts a shadow!  They’re such a powerful tool for implying depth and space, I add them wherever I can.  A cast shadow is also a great way to break up a big blank boring wall, since characters aren’t going to be in interesting places forever.

Over the years I’ve experimented with how light or dark I should make my backgrounds.  Early on I had a problem where my main characters would get lost in a background (since I’m a dummy and I paint them before the backgrounds!!), but I wanted to have a rich palette of values in my environments.  I always try to cast a scene in favorable lighting but that isn’t always right for the location or time of day.  I’ve tried lightening the background to preserve a sense of internal contrast apart from the characters but I didn’t really like how this looked- it works great for atmospheric long-depth perspective but in a shallower scene it feels forced.  The trick that I adopted- that I’m quite happy with- is to give my main characters a glow!  A glow is a halo of lighter value acting as a secondary outline around the silhouette of a figure to help them pop out from their environments, and it’s actually a technique I borrowed from graffiti writers who use a glow to help their pieces pop out from a visually-noisy background.  In practice it acts how a black outline works on a white page, except in reverse and not as stark, and it helps give the characters a feeling like the environmental light is actually reflecting around them.  I’m conscious not to completely enclose a character in glow; when they’re sitting or their feet touch the ground the glow terminates to show the weight of their bodies is in direct contact with another surface, and it helps make them a part of their environment.  I’ve thought a bit about if I want to keep using glow in my comics but for the time being I think it works out well, as long as the lines aren’t too thick or too sharp in contrast it does its job well!

One last trick I didn’t mention about backgrounds:  a big reason I like to do them at the end is because I type up my text after I paint my subjects so I can word things to not be so wordy that text overlaps characters, and then I can build my word balloons behind the text.  With a whole bunch of word balloons in a panel I have a whole bunch of space where I don’t need to paint a background, and that makes the process go by much quicker (relatively speaking, since I’m painting each individual environment from scratch in every panel)!!  

Attached to this entry is a .gif of the current demonstration panel- I saved about 14 instances of my process and created a cycle showing its development so you can see all the little changes I make while I’m constructing my environments.  Take a look if you’re curious, it captures a couple corrections and mistakes I made mid-process.

Thanks for reading!