#drawing environments

Making a webtoon is hard. The company requires the equvialent of 8 full color print pages a week from most Originals creators, and to keep up with the deadlines, it’s inevitable that shortcuts are going to be used. A common shortcut when it comes to drawing the backdrops of a scene is using premade 3D assets to construct the background, or even buying fully rendered backgrounds from webtoon-building services. This is perfectly understandable, since in most comics, the focus is on the characters rather than where they are.

The issue is when these premade asset backgrounds don’t match the art that sits on top of them. 

Not-so-Shoujo Love Story is a comedy comic about two girls experiencing their first love. It suffers from some pacing issues and some characterization inconsistencies, but is occasionally very funny and also one of three Originals about lesbians, so it gets some points for that. We’re talking about it now though because the backgrounds this comic uses are rendered with far more detail and in a completely different style of lineart and coloring than the characters.

When done deliberately, like with drawings of characters on top of photographs, this can work really well, but here it ends up taking the reader out of the story by being distractingly inconsistent.

Environments don’t have to be detailed. What they have to be is right for your comic. 

I haven’t been reading the new romance webtoon LMLY because my patience for straight high school stories is severely limited, but I appreciate how the environments and characters are rendered in the same clean, simple, graphic style. It feels like the bench and the characters are existing in the same world. 

Some of the other drawing shortcuts LMLY takes (like their approach to rendering dialogue) are a little weird, but they nail the exact level of detail needed to make their environments work.

When people think of comics with good environments, they tend to lean towards lush fantasy and science fiction because it’s easier to be impressed when you’re looking at something complicated that someone had to make up from scratch. (A Webtoon I’m not really keeping up with but which has gorgeous fantasy environments is Little Matcha Girl. This town looks so good.)   

But I think effective contemporary environments are also really commendable, because it is so easy to just drop “cityscape asset pack 3″ into your comic and call it a day instead of putting in the effort to make the background look like part of your comic.

Environments are super hard to draw (speaking from experience here!) But spending a little extra time on making sure your locations match your characters and are specific to your story can go a long way.

Exercise: Artists, it’s time to draw! Writers, pretend you’re writing a script someone will draw for you. Draw your character’s bedroom. Think about the kind of bed they sleep in (sleeping bag? four-poster canopy bed? the same bed they’ve had since they were 5?) and how and why their room is decorated the way it is (did their mom do it for them? is this your character’s first-ever independent apartment? are they an interior designer by day?) Include at least 5 personal effects (clothes, bags, a rug, a poster, a stuffed animal, things like that.)

Webtoon Rec of the Day: I haven’t read most of Little Matcha Girl so I’m not sure if I can recommend it on a story level, but as visual inspiration for environment design you could do a lot worse. A comic I have been reading and enjoying, though, is Maya’s World, which takes place in the Indonesian city of Bandung. The environments are perfectly suited to the characters in them.