Making a Background (Patreon)

I've been out of town this weekend, so I wasn't able to make a comic, but I thought I would put up my process for making this specific background which I have used in many of my recent comics.

I made this backgrounds entirely using Photoshop, but I'm sure you could follow similar steps using other graphic editing softwares.

First thing I did was create the islands. I made them in order of apparent distance, from nearest to furthest. Your starting color isn't that important as you can edit all of that later.

Next I added some trees. You can take any tree silhouette that you wish, and turn it into a brush preset, or simply paste several of them where you wish, transforming their sizes as you go. For more information on how to create a brush from a silhouette, look at my previous tutorial.

Similarly, I created the other islands, I lightened their color as they got further away. Each island is on it's own layer, with the closer islands on top. I drew the windmill myself, but you could also easily find an image of a windmill (or house, or lighthouse, etc) and create a silhouette.

Next I created a base water layer and placed it underneath the island layers.

If you suck at drawing water, as I do, you can create your own water texture with stock images. The following stock image I found simply searching Google images and selecting open source images only.

This image happens to already be at a bit of an angle, which simplifies things. But the angle is still not quite right. I squashed the vertical dimensions to create the illusion of a more "edge-on" angle, and shrunk it to fit in the space where my water base layer lies.

I know, this looks weird. The water is hyper realistic and detailed while the land is flat and more stylized. We'll fix that. Here's the water layer by itself, with the islands removed.

I then desaturated it, removing all color. In photoshop you can do this by clicking Ctrl+U and lowering the saturation to the minimum value.

I want to make this into a brush that paints the water highlights only. Since making a brush uses black/grey values and ignores white, I'm going to invert this image, so the light values become dark. You can invert by pressing Ctrl+I, or going to image>adjustments>invert.

To make a more stylized brush (not so realistic), I need the darks to look darker, and the lights to look lighter. To do this I change the levels of the layer (Image > Adjustments > Levels), then adjust the sliders till you end up with something you like.

Now you can either use this image for the next step, or you can create a brush for future use. To make a brush simply go to Edit > Define Brush Preset. Then you can change the brush to whichever color you wish, and paint it onto your base water layer. I chose a lighter blue.

Here's how it looks with the islands:

Still looks bizarre. The water is way too saturated with color, while the islands are more muted. To fix this, I created a new layer to go on top of the water, but beneath the islands. I made this layer a gradient, with a lighter grey on top and a darker grey on bottom. The reason I'm making a gradient and not a single color is because I want the water to fade as it approaches the horizon, just like the islands do.

To achieve this I decreased the opacity of this layer to 50%, and changed the properties of the layer from "normal" to "lighten". This way it will lighten the layers below it.

That looks much better. Now we need a sky. I made another gradient layer with whites and greys to match the colors of the rest of the image. I placed this layer beneath everything.

Here's how it looks with the rest of the image:

Now we need some clouds. The cloud layer will be on top of the sky layer, and below the island layer. Perhaps in the future I'll make a tutorial for a cloud brush, but I essentially found an image of a cloud, desaturated it, and made it into a brush. Then I adjusted the opacity of the brush, and used a few brush tricks from my previous tutorial.

Using a similar brush to the cloud brush, I added some haze. To do this you want to brush on some white at a very low opacity (~10% or so) between each of the island layers. A haze layer between island 1 and 2, a haze layer between island 2 and 3, and so on. You can play with the opacity of the layers as well to achieve the desired effect.

The image is basically done, but at this point you can make some simple adjustments to alter the image colors based on your needs.

For the purposes of my comic, I wanted it to be a bit more colorful, so I flattened the image into one layer (make a copy first!), and adjusted the hue and saturation (ctrl+u). I added some saturation +15% and shifted the hue a bit.

In a later comic, I used this same image to make a nighttime version. To do this I first adjusted the lightness and saturation using the same tool as before (ctrl+U). I dropped the lightness (-40), added saturation (+50), and shifted the hue to a purple (+40).

To make it look more like night, I added the moon, First I just added a white circle and some dots for stars:

Then added some details, and cut a circle out of the moon to make a crescent:

And finally added a bit of a glow to the moon. To do this you can simply duplicate the moon/stars layer and blur it (Filters > Blur > Gaussian blur). I added 50px of blur.

I used similar methods to make other backgrounds which I have used for other comics, such as these:

It may seem weird that I draw my characters and then use almost entirely graphic design tools to make my backgrounds, but I think it works. You generally want your backgrounds to stand separately from your foreground. Traditionally comic artists would achieve this by using more muted colors and thinner ink strokes, but I think a shift in style can work too.