Hey! Your underground temple is absolutely stunning!!! I was wondering if you have any process pics of it? I would love to see your workflow :)
Hello and sorry for the late reply !
I did this design during my summer internship last year, andi was under the supervision of @vnzzz who taught me the steps to follow inorder to understand background design. I’ll try to explain those steps and my personalprocess through this thread.
1. Early stages : Thumbnailing andsketching
Here are a chunk of the sketches i did to begin with :
My first sketches (not shown here) were way too focused on details, and mysupervisor brought me back to the essentials : getting a strongsilouhette, making a clear statement. The key word being : concept. Myidea was an underground forgotten temple, trapped within a huge structure, akinto huge sewers mixed with industrial elements. The goal was then to design theplace like i would with a character : trying to find a good shape andsilouhette, a clear one, that quickly translate your idea to the viewer. Atthis point there is a lot of brainstorming to do, and refining your concept byasking yourself a lot of questions :
-How did this place came to life ?–Who lives there ? –What kind of time period is it ?
Once i had made enough research to figureout the global design of the scene, i made a 3d model in google sketchup. Ithelped me to figure out the global proportions of the place and have a betterunderstanding of its volume. This is a free and very simple software that irecommend a lot ! The other great advantage of 3d in this case is that youcan place your camera anywhere you’d like and generate a simple linework out ofit. This method is used in production work because it allows layout andbackground artists to start with a good volume and perspective basis. Fromthere, they’ll use a design reference and complete the linework.
After choosing an interesting view of thetemple, i started to add the main structural elements. It was a process ofgoing back and forth with my supervisor who provided a lot of advices andcorrections that i applied the best i could to the design. Going through manyiterations, the temple started to take form. One of the important task was toadd details without loosing the sense of structure and silhouette. It isimportant to establish good scale relationships between the elements in orderto keep it coherent.
This brings me to the next point :
This is probably one of the most criticalpoint of drawing in my opinion. Ourimagination is fairly grounded in reality. It is really hard for us to imaginesomething completely from scratch, especially in the fields of drawing andcreative work. If you want to draw something which is believable, be it acharacter or background, you’ll need to understand it well. The references thencome into play. Internet gives the artists of today a tremendous amount ofinformations and photographies about a huge range of topics, that artists fromthe past couldn’t even dream of, and it would be a waste not to take advantageof it !
In my opinion, understanding is key, andmore important than copying. While using references, a good thing is to analysewhat you are seeing, deconstruct the information in order to re-use it at wishwhen you need it.
Here are just some examples of references ipicked up for this design :
The sewers of Tokyo : This was a hugediscovery for me ! I had no idea that this kind of structure existed and iwas amazed by its sheer gigantism ! And it also was a perfect fit to whatkind of ambiance i was looking for!
A LOT of temple, shrines and eastern asia architecturereferences ! I needed to know and understand what i was seeing, how thoseroofs would assemble, what shape would the pillars be, what kind of materialsand details would compose this kind of architecture and so on…
Some industrial and mecanical references aswell for the pipes and ruins around !
While using references, i went on tocleaning. When designing a background, i don’t think you need to have a perfectlinework as long as everything reads well and clearly. At this stage it ismostly refining everything, adding details. A good thing is to have differentline thickness for the foreground and background, details and global shapes. Itbuilds hierarchy and make different planes differenciate better from eachother.
I added simple colors areas in order tomake the different elements of the design stand out. It doesn’t relate to thereal colors, they are merely informative.
Once i finished everything, i decided to bringit to life with color, and then compositing and 3d, but this would deserve a different thread !
6.Last words and ressources :
I hope you enjoyed this thread and that it’llbe of any help !
Go check the blogs of my supervisors andcolleagues during my internship, they do RAD backgrounds :
Thomas Romain and his perspective tipswich are a must-have ! They are very clear and useful !
Concerning resources, i would recommend (ifyou haven’t already) getting a pinterest account with loads of boards.
Also check https://www.textures.com it is basically aimed for 3d texturing, but there is a lot of variety in shapes and forms whichcan be useful when looking for references.
There also is THIS reddit called the « safefor work porn network » Despite its strange name, this reddit has thousands and thousandspictures about many different topics. You can spend hours gathering referencesthere.
As a conclusion, i would say go anddraw, draw a lot, and draw some more, keep practicing, analysing, referencing,designing and having fun !
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