Inumerable, Unfinished Landscapes

In illustration, it is the subjects—people, animals, even objects—which are compelling.* They may be animate, show bend, scrunch, stretch, and twist, and may vary from depicted "moment" to "moment." These are the things on which we, as readers or as viewers, focus our attention. Yet, despite all these enticing features, subjects require context. And thus, I am forced to tackle that which gives me something akin to dread: backgrounds.

I have begun to realize that, in order to adequately tell my stories, I must learn to treat the setting as a component as important as character, no matter how much more involved I am in the unfolding lives of my characters. Some of my favorite comic/manga artists are so because of their ability to do just that: Amy Reeder Hadley can whisk us through myriad locations as fascinatingly as through time in Madame Xanadu; Sean Gordon Murphy's urban backgrounds are as gritty and interesting as the characters populating them. These artists, and others (M. Alice Legrow also leaps to mind) are able to create whole worlds, not just sets of characters.

My distaste for backgrounds is probably not particularly well hidden by my clumsy attempts at them. They are necessary, but not well-loved; so, neither have they been well-designed. Although it may not be obvious, I have been trying to improve this in my recent double-page spread (pages 41 and 42—see without text on dA). When plotting/designing the Heterochromia script, I included the landscape spread because it is important to the story (though it may not seem so yet), but also in order to force myself to practice. I anticipated the spread for months; at the beginning of the school year, I had already written it into the script, and even wrote myself notes to work on it early. Even given all that warning and anticipation, I felt such trepidation that, by the end of the school year, when I had all the pages leading up to it done and no more time buffer, I still had only the barest designs ready.

I didn't yet know how to approach the task. So I tried every approach.

Drawing Freely

Purple ink on a piece of printer paper (8.5" x 11")

Having to adhere to perspective lines—that subject I am forever relearning, rereferencing—is one of the most daunting parts of backgrounds for me, so I decided to try to eliminate it in the first steps.

Once I had some idea of how I wanted the city to look, I applied a bit more perspective to it, and tightened up the look.

Between these steps, I had to make a decision: should the cityscape be viewed from above or from among the buildings? The latter would allow me to better show the decayed and dilapidated nature of the city remains, but the former made more narrative sense, being from Tamino and Tilamere's perspective. Ultimately I chose a view from among the taller buildings, for the above reason and because it made a more compelling scene and composition.

Pencil on 2 connected pieces of graph paper (11" x 16.5")

Mathematical Approach

Pencil 3-point perspective grid drawn on 2 connected pieces of graph paper (11" x 16.5")

Drawing vanishing points as far off the paper as possible and trying to connect other points to them is a method I find ultimately infuriating and inaccurate—it is possibly one of the larger deterrents from proper perspective for me. In order to circumvent that particular frustration, I turned to math to create a perspective grid (almost incredible that it alleviated frustration, given all the work involved, but I do still find it less frustrating).

Reviewing and utilizing trigonometry, I was able to create virtual vanishing points to which to connect everything.

Although at first I tried to roughly draw in buildings and then use the coordinates of the corners to determine the angle of the "real" perspective lines of the building, I ended up simply drafting lines radiating at regular angle intervals from each of the vanishing points. In the final illustration (yes, I made more than one grid this way), the set of lines connecting to each vanishing point is a different color.

Final Stages

City details penciled and inked on colored-pencil grid (green, pink, purple) on 2 connected pieces of printer paper (11" x 17")

Having drawn and inked all the lines, I scanned in the illustration (in 2 parts, which had to be digitally reattached) and prepared it for toning. To distinguish depths of field, I separately toned foreground, fore-mid-ground, midground, far-midground, background, and sky. The tallest buildings, which stick out most, were each given separate shading.

False color "grounds"

Once I had balanced out the values between fore- and back- grounds, I applied some translucent gradients to make the transition more gradual. Over that went textures, to add to the grittiness and decay of the cityscape, resulting in:

Not the most detailed cityscape possible, but I believe I made a good decision to call it done when I did, rather than let it languish forever in the land of requiring more realism and detail. The skill to add more detail and still create such a setting is one I will have to acquire with time, as I continue to make myself focus more on setting as a visual storytelling element.

*Of course, this is not universally true. There are a number of artists who design fantastic, intriguing land-, sea-, space-, and city- scapes.