One of my biggest digital art pieces to date – if not my biggest!
When designing backgrounds for the outside world, I chose to be inspired by mangaka’s, and the way they’ll often design backgrounds to save on time. They’ll sometimes just use straight up photos as backgrounds, sometimes put through a filter to look a little more like a drawing. Since I’m trying to work with a somewhat unnatural colour palette, I chose to draw over the photos to create my background within the styles of the interior spaces.
So, I began by using photo bashing to combine various parts of Perth Road, Dundee so that the perspective would look how I wanted it to throughout the entire panning background, but also would feature the buildings I wanted to feature.
This is really my first look at what the exterior spaces of the real world will look like, so it took a lot of time trying to determine the level of detail and what sort of colour palettes I’d use going forward. I wanted to try and carry over little details I’d established in the interiors – such as drawing the individual bricks on the walls – to establish consistency within all my backgrounds. Though even with this in mind. the sheer scale of the background in comparison to the typical HD one I’d usually work towards creating, did mean I had to lose some detail in a few places that wouldn’t be as visible. I also used this as a way to try and better convey things like depth within the bushes.
In terms of colour, I was still keeping with the warm toned colours and variety of browns I’d used in the interior, but overall, I wanted to work a greater number of pinks and yellows into the design, as well as turquoise as a highlight colour, in order to create some contract in the colour palettes to better indicate the change in both scenery and time of day.
In terms of the blocked-out section in the upper left of the background, it’s there due to the strange dimensions this background needed to be to match the planned movements the camera would need to take for my planned shot. None of that space will be needed, so it was easiest to just block it out completely from the get go.
The lighting was a struggle to figure out for me, but was definitely one of my favourite bits to work on!
I wanted to do early morning light, since a big part of the story I want to convey is the passing of time over the course of the day, so I began by looking at a number of referenced of streets at the start of the day. I noticed a lot of the street itself was quite dark, since the sun would be quite low in the sky, so the light would just be peeking over the top of the buildings. Then, I paired that with the more defined rays of light poking through the bushes, that matched the stylised light I had established in some of my earlier backgrounds.
And with that, my biggest digital art piece was done!