#catlatchis

I think a big subliminal reference for me has always been calvin and hobbes

Think about how little Watterson is actually showing, we don't know where exactly in the forest this is, but it conveys enough and has characters actively interacting with the environment, they feel solid and real despite it mostly being a white void! that's something I personally appreciate more even if I'm not perfect at execution.

Here we see a brilliant use of a limited color pallette!! That forest scene in the second panel I just want to eat, and is a great example of the foreground, midground, and background being layered - with those dark dark foreground trees framing. And then in the next two outta three panels theres barely any background at all!! basically what I'm trying to say is I love the enthusiasm and specifically for clangen comics it's okay to aim for Garfield not Golden Shrike you feel me 😅

OTHERWISE people have suggested watching Bob Ross, who can go more in depth about particular techniques and light/color basics from a more painterly perspective. I also specifically use these awesome brushes - which now that you know my secret you'll see it all the time in ranchclan.

Mod Selkie🦭 says:

i'll try to touch on things that lucky didn't but i did end up rambling about something they mentioned so my apologies for the length and scatterment!

my advice is to think of backgrounds as part of the set. your characters are influenced by the environment they live in, so think of why they're there and what they get out of being there that they don't get from anywhere else. this write-up of a college art course designing two interiors for the same character is really excellent, you get to see a lot of examples of how different people think about set design.

set design includes doing research. like lucky said, learning about the ecology and terrain of your setting is going to help heaps. i have a couple of documents that are just lists of the native flora of my setting, and while i take some pretty extreme liberties with the underwater life, i try to keep the list of land flora close at hand when i'm drawing, so that when i need to reach for flowers or trees, i know what kinds of flowers and trees to look up for references.

drawing a map of areas you want to keep consistent can also help, especially if you have any building interiors, but this also works well for camp. having two fallen-over logs that appear to be mostly in the same spot in your backgrounds can help ground your comic in space. the map doesn't have to be good--it just has to let you visualize how your characters are moving through space, even if you just draw a couple circles and label them "tree" and "highrock" or such.

be prepared to step outside your comfort zone when you're drawing backgrounds, and as an extension of this, use generous numbers of references. i use pureref and pinterest to collect all my references in one place for a project (i believe pureref is pay what you want, it's a simple program that really helps with reference organization).

finally, i use the same brushes lucky linked! they come with some really good videos on brush usage, but i know for a fact in the grasses video devin discusses how she goes from a blank canvas to a nice environmental painting.

my tl;dr is: use lots and lots of references!