- ENDER//HUNTER//HUMAN -

Anxiety

Silver Patterns! New skull in my shop.

With a chuckle, brushes away her concerns. “Light permits my body to create and discharge Arc energy. But the arc energy itself is just that: Arc Energy. Besides! You’re part Light.” The lightning in his hands crackles violently. It’s seething tendrils lick towards the Princess’s direction as her telekinesis coaxes them closer.

“I mean, yeah, but Light also makes my skin crawl, so clearly, there is something not agreeing there,” Ronja says, a little nervous as the energy stretches out towards her palms. Once it reaches her, it hovers between her hands, and she does her best to keep it under control, letting it stretch and collapse, a bit like an electrified slinky.

Pulling his gaze away from the sooty mask upon the ceiling, he looks at the rest of the room. He then looks at her with a stern, disappointed look. “Well shit kid, your mom’s gunna kill me!” He says. His mouth then sneaks into a maniacal smirk. With a deep inhale Ender’s body erupts into crackling arc energy, a shimmering blade appearing in his hand. He throws the blade aside and offers her the lightning sizzling from his hands and arms. “No going back now, go crazy.”

“No, she’ll kill me. Then ground me until I’m eighteen probably. Not the first time I’ve set something on fire,” Ronja says with an unconcerned shrug. This is just the first time it’s gotten just a tiny bit out of control, and even then… the damage is not extensive, nor irreparable, just… unfortunate. She is generally careful not to do things like this where she’ll cause lasting damage.

The Ahamkara watches the yarn bounce, and then roll a few feet away from her. Her tip of her tail taps against the ground, and she looks back to the Guardian, yellow eyes narrowed.

What is that for?

“I… I don’t even know how you did this. Why are their scorch marks on the ceiling??”

We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of, but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of using it.

Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:

How do you populate your backgrounds?

Well, here’s the answer:

If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to that environment.

The examples above are great because they show how to use the software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their environment.

How do you fix this?

Well, here’s the simplest solution:

This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background and an environment.

From Blacksad (artist: Juanjo Guarnido)

From Hellboy (Mike Mignola)

Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine), people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.

I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!

Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!

Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)

The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.

By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!

Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.

We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!