Painting Backgrounds. It’s Been a While Hasn’t It?

The very first part of these last practices was focused on creating something authentic. I started by choosing random references or simply exploring a few illustration ideas I had from a couple of days ago, but sadly, nothing stuck. Even though I had made some progress on a few of them, I ended up painting a picture of a city. I think I liked how the girl in the picture stood out amidst all the chaos around her since she was readable.

Painting backgrounds has always been interesting to me, but I have never explored it deeply. I have done a few for my current project, but not as a personal endeavor, just for the sake of trying. I have even imagined going out to take casual pictures of the architecture here in Spain to paint later. This might be something worth trying in the future. For now, painting Japanese cityscapes also brings me a certain pleasure.

The way I approach complex environment paintings is by separating the objects in the foreground, middle ground, and background with lines. This helps me maintain order and establish a sense of depth. Tackling such a complex task can be overwhelming, and it is easy not to know where to start. By segmenting the information, it becomes more approachable, at least in my experience.

After that, I use a brush with strong edges to define the object shapes. Since they are mostly solid shapes, like buildings and lights, using soft-edge brushes can make it more difficult to read the spaces in between. It helps to paint subjects that share similar characteristics with squared strokes on the same layer. For example, the lights in the background are all similar in shape, so I thought making them part of the same layer would help me later when adding different colors without altering their silhouettes. From that point, it is mostly refinement, and it really helps to have some kind of distraction in the background if you do not need to focus too hard.

Anyway, enjoy the process video and let me know if you have any questions. Thank you for your support.

Process Video: https://youtu.be/ImVasSRO-Ew