Painting a background
Today I painted a background for my Blue Beetle. My first step was to make a quick and dirty rough value estimate, to get the composition right. I used safe areas to guide my composition- it doesn’t matter for this particular instance, but since my goal is backgrounds for animation, it’s an important principle to bear in mind.
I decided to go for the tunnel composition, to really frame and accentuate the character, especially since this is a still rather than an animation.
I didn’t follow this sketch 1:1- I ended up shifting things quite a bit to the left- but the end result looks pretty good:
I used Affinity Photo’s gouache brushes for this exclusively. It’s not great, but at the same time, it’s not horrible. I’m decently happy with it.
Altogether, we have this:
I added a slight film grain and a slight warm overlay to help tie the character to the background. I also added Diffuse Glow to the character to get the look I was going for.