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!

It’s got an almost endless range of furniture, doors, windows, stairs etc and is easy to use. In addition to that, you don’t have to install anything and if you create an account (which is free) you can save and return to your houses.

Examples (all done by me):

Here’s an example for how you can use it

UMM I think the most effective way to learn anatomy varies from person to person but for me, I like drawing the muscles over pictures to see how they work/ their placement in action! SO USING THE ARM as an example

omg somehow this became about arms BUT YEAH I basically do the same for other body parts and DOING THIS rly helps me visualize where what belongs where, and it also helps me with getting a 3d image! Im not sure if THE LAST PART makes sense but I also think it’s very important to understand how things are CONNECTED i.e. when you’re studying muscles, always try to see what other muscles they’re connected to + where they are on the body (do they face outward/ does that change when the body moves?) SAME FOR BODY PARTS (where arm attaches to shoulder/ where leg attaches to hip etc)

omigod i drew a reply to this and somehow in my head I remembered it as an ask about fists but it wasn’t?????????? I WENT COMPLETELY OFF THE SUBJECT and to goodness knows where

HELLO anons and THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR YOUR KIND WORDS! I think it’s hard to recommend specific tutorials bc I feel like what works for one person might not always work for another, but here are some good general resources I enjoy!!

This pinterest has A LOT of tutorials and references

Andrew Loomis’ books are gorgeous to look at and helpful!

YOUTUBE and gumroad are great resources, you can find a lot of helpful anatomy guides/ tutorials/ process videos on there e.g. proko, this video by steve huston, life drawing stuff etc AND here’s a list of some tutorials available on Gumroad

FOR Color, I’ve found this site and this site to be really good!

I also really like these tutorials HERE and HERE

AND some other art books I’ve found helpful are Anatomy for sculptors, Steve Huston’s figure drawing for artists, and michael hampton’s stuff!

LAST BUT NOT LEAST don’t be afraid to use photo references!!! IT WILL REALLY HELP

Also you can buy my Ref folder here