Backgrounds are essential in all kinds of visual art.
Whether you’re working on illustration, comics, videogame concept art, or animation, being able to create interesting and believable backgrounds is necessary.
This course gives you useful tools and skills to create backgrounds. This isn’t about just creating beautiful landscapes or complicated cityscapes – it’s about how to start from nothing and construct a world and backgrounds that feels interesting. We’ll explain how to create concepts for a space, choose interesting camera angles in that space, and think about the effects that different camera/lens settings would have. Getting the job done is important, so understanding perspective and creating/using greyboxes are what we’ll focus on.
Assumed knowledge #
You should have a basic understanding of drawing and drawing skills. Urban sketching or similar exercises helps, but is not required. This course is focused on boosting your ability to create interesting backgrounds – so if you’re brand new to drawing you may need to do some basic drawing classes or practice before jumping into this course.
Learning objectives #
Upon completion of this course, you should be able to:
- Create concepts for a space to draw.
- Take that space and choose interesting ways to view it.
- Consider what effects camera/lens settings would have.
- Draw those interesting backgrounds at a close-mid scale.
- Position elements at different depths in your backgrounds.
Course concept #
In this course, ‘locations’ mean the places you’ll try to represent, and ‘backgrounds’ are the representations of those on 2D media. This course has been structured to help you come up with / think about locations and how to create interesting backgrounds from them. We’ll try to emphasise understanding and skills that will serve you across different mediums.
Rather that constructing 100% physically accurate backgrounds, we’re focused on making interesting and believable ones.
Thanks go out to #
- OJ (@ahappypichu): For help planning this course, providing art / examples, and being an amazing sounding board on the aspects of background art, concepting, etc.