Learning to draw beautiful, expressive backgrounds, environments, landscapes is a wonderful skill that will help you become a more well rounded artist. This skill requires you to understand how different components integrate in space. This means sharpening up those composition, perspective, color theory, and value skills.
It’s a lot, but it’s worth it.
If you plan to create digitally, before you begin, please consider checking out a Beginner’s Guide to Digital Art. The websites at the bottom are particularly useful for all artists!
Recommended Reading – Articles
- This article by Goodnight-Melbourne provides an indepth tutorial on painting backgrounds.
- Awesome applied demo on depth and foregrounds, middle grounds, and backgrounds.
- Covers composition in photography, but applies everywhere.
- Unifying Foregrounds and Backgrounds (TUTORIAL) by Alex-Chow
- Layout Background Exercise
- Tips for Drawing Backgrounds
- How To Draw Landscapes For The Absolute Beginner
- How to Draw : Drawing and Sketching Objects and Environments
- How to Draw With Perspective
- Craft a Dramatic Vector Landscape Environment
- Improve Your Artwork by Learning to See Light and Shadow
Videos & Channels
- SketchUp Videos
- 3D should help you visualize and understand what you’re trying to create in 3D. I actually recommend downloading SketchUp and experimenting.
- Mead McLean’s Youtube - wonderful and detailed videos. Surprised he doesn’t have more subscribers.
Specific Tutorials
Decided against including images to optimize performance. I picked these out by hand and most of them are semi-realistic to realistic and include theory as well as step by step.
- Background Tutorial by tanaw
- Background Tutorial 1& part2 by Tervola
- Background Tutorial Part 1 & Background tutorial - Part 2 by kalambo
- Background Tutorial by Snowfirewolf
- Background Art Process/Tutorial by sendrawz
- [Step Art] Background Tutorial by Sakon04 - Walkthrough / Step by Step Demo
- Landscape/Background Tutorialby SeerLight
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