some thoughts abt painting scenery/backgrounds that i wanted to put somewhere
i’ve always really struggled with environments and background art and i think a lot of it has to do with the sheer weight of all the research it takes? which is in part a lack of experience, but also, you have to /know/ so much more to create an environment than to create a subject in that environment. drawing people is fine, just know the general light temperature & direction and you’re usually set. but creating a setting from scratch is 1000% more work than that for what feels like the same or less payoff.
where is the setting? can you see the sky? if so, what time of day/what color is the sky? are there clouds? is there weather? if outside, are there trees? what kind? are there more than one kind? if so, do those two trees realistically occur near each other? what are their bark/branch/leaf shapes? colors? is the ground dirt, is there grass? are you ready to render every single patch of it? at what intervals are the trees planted? are they realistically close/far from each other?
i think i find it overwhelming to be responsible for every single answer to these. and a common answer is “who cares? it’s /your/ art!” but like, every person who looks at it will care, because rendering something in an aesthetically pleasing way is key to making good art. if you put pine next to palm trees, no one will focus on the art, they’ll only focus on why you put two trees from different climates in the same area. a scene has to have some semblence of “looking right” before any viewer can focus on the actual uniqueness of the image itself.
aside from that, i think i’m also a) picky about what environments i find “pleasing” and b) i have a short ass attention span for “places” or “locations”. my noncreative family members will sometimes point at a kitschy painting of a farm scene or a vally and say “you could paint that” but like. how long would you, a viewer, want to look at this? because the artist has to spend a minimum of /several hours/ becoming intimately familiar with every single corner of it. you can’t ask me to paint something this boring because i’d be committing to spend hours poring over every /boring/ detail and i don’t have the attention span for it.
i try not to think about it, but it’s a deep-seated fear of mine that my inability to focus on & practice backgrounds will hold me back as an artist. i feel like it already does. but when considering the Time & Effort vs Reward ratio, it’s just not something i want to work on? i have very little time for drawing anymore, so i want to make it count, but that pressure and anxiety becomes overwhelming very quickly. what if you spend your only day off on a painting, only to get frustrated with it and scrap it at the end of the day? is that time well-spent because you practiced, or is it wasted because you don’t feel like you created anything worthwhile?
anyway, food for thought
