Hi everyone! Chiken here.
In the last chapter, we rendered
our character and some props.
In this chapter, we will touch on backgrounds.
And learn how to use perspective to
construct our backgrounds and render some plants.
But first, in this lesson, we will go through
some background cheats to quickly fill in a background.
Let's use our current illustration, and I'll size her
up so it's more of a portrait shot.
The first easy background is
simply just using flat colors.
I don't usually like to use flat colors as
I prefer painting characters in natural lighting and environments.
But flat colors can be really nice too when used well.
We can go with a very, very simple white background.
But as always, I prefer to use a cream instead of a flat white.
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And if we put a very slight
dark gradient at the bottom, it will look quite nice.
Then, to blend our character in, I'll use an
airbrush, and very slightly introduce the background color to
the border of where our light is coming from.
And that's a very simple white background done!
The second flat color will be a
black, or a very dark color.
I think this is a lot harder to pull off than
a white or lighter background, and usually the character itself will
be painted in a way that fits the dark background.
So this character we have currently won't suit
the dark background as she's too bright.
So, I've gotten another character here
that will fit in more.
And like the light background, I'll put in
a dark color but not completely black.
And we'll also introduce a slight gradient.
I'm just going to airbrush a light color
where our light is coming in from.
And again, like the light background, I'm going to airbrush
that same color over our character to blend her in
with the background more. I'll set it to an add layer
mode just to brighten things up a lot.
Generally, this method is good for portraits
with very stark or dramatic lighting.
And for characters with limited color palettes.
And the last flat color background is using a
high contrast color, like a really bright neon color.
This sort of background can be really high
impact and effective for character focused illustrations.
And to choose the color, we will go back
to our analogous and complementary colors.
Picking one of those can give
you a pretty nice color palette.
However, I do find this type of
background the hardest to pull off.
The next method, which is the method I
use the most, is having a blurred background.
There's many ways to get photos to blur.
One way is to get a photograph of some scenery.
You can take one yourself.
I always like to take random
photos of scenery for this reason.
Or you can just find one off Google.
Just Google the keywords or something you're
trying to find like a cherry blossom
background for example, or sunset sky.
For this piece, I'm going to paste in a
photo that I took. I'll first position it with
respect to our character, and we can start adjusting
the colors to match up illustration.
Usually, I'll turn up the saturation and I'll
mess with the color balance a bit.
I try to get the hues closer to what I
already have on my canvas. Because it has purple.
I'll shift the hues a bit more towards the purple side.
And when we are happy with the colors, we
can go ahead and apply a Gaussian blur to it.
I'm going to adjust it a bit more and flip
it because I think it looks better that way.
And to finish off, I'll just adjust the
gamma curves until I think it looks nice.
I'm going to make it slightly lighter so that
our character can really stand out here and we
have ourselves a really nice but really easy background.
Another option is using screenshots from
games, which I do too.
Games with 3D environments can give you
some really nice scenery shots, which you
can use for blurred backgrounds.
Or we can even use random drawings.
You can even use another piece of art you did
blur it sufficiently until it's unreadable, then adjust the colors
using the same methods to fit our illustration.
Here, I just used our existing character and I
blurred it until you can't really tell what it
is anymore, and shifted the colors a bit.
If you think it's still too readable, we
can even apply a motion blur to it.
This will blur it directionally and
it will be even more unreadable.
And we made another really easy background.
The next quick background is to
just use a simple textured background.
Procreate has all these really nice brushes that
are really textured and can create detail and
noise without you putting in too much effort.
We can start by putting in a base tone.
I'll choose one similar to what we have on
the canvas already, and I'll make it pretty light.
Next, I'll grab a darker color here and start adding
some texture to the background with one of those brushes.
I like the brushes available in the
"Materials" tab of the Procreate brushes.
You can play around with a few in a single piece.
You can even use more than one here.
I kind of used all of them, and the trick is
to layer on different shades to make it more interesting.
I'm gonna add a touch of pink.
And to the corner, I'm just gonna introduce
some yellow as our lighting.
As you can see, I kept the most texture concentrated
to the bottom of the canvas. So it doesn't bring
too much attention away from the characters face up here.
And we have a background that will work pretty nicely.
But to add more interest and framing.
Sometimes I'll crop it like this and
to do something fun with the frame.
We can even make it as if our character is
coming out of the frame, I'll position her a bit closer to the frame.
And I'll just use the auto
select tool and select the space outside the frame.
Then, I go to my character layer and erase the
bottom part that I want to be within the frame.
Now it kind of looks like she is coming out
of the square and it's just something fun and interesting
that you can do.
For full bodies, however, blurred backgrounds don't work that well
since it will just look like the
character is suspended in air.
So to make full bodies look a little bit more
interesting, I like to very simply add a shiny floor.
I will add a base color first,
and add a simple gradient as always.
Next, I'll duplicate my character, flip it, and position it
in a way that it looks like it's her reflection.
This character has hair that touches the floor so I
separated it into a different layer and I can flip
it and position it where her hair touches the floor.
Then I'll use the airbrush tool on the eraser
and I'll erase it such that it looks like
the parts closer to the ground are being reflected
more and I'll do the same for the hair.
Now it looks really cool.
It looks like the floor is very reflective but
to add another dimension to it sometimes I'll add
a shadow so for that I'm just going to
make a layer with our whole character.
I'll drag it to the bottom of the reflections
and I'm going to make it a darker color.
I'll set it to multiply layer
mode with a lower opacity.
Then I'll use the distort transform tool and drag it
down such that it looks like her shadow.
And we can use the pencil select tool with the Gaussian blur
to make the parts further away from her look more blurry.
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And we have a nice looking shadow.
So, these are just some ways to add a really quick and
easy background to our character illustrations.
In this lesson, we went through some quick background cheats.
In the next lesson, I'll go through the
principles of perspective and procreate's perspective tools that
can help you compose more complex backgrounds.