Hello gaymers, welcome back to the monthly rant of the month where I feed you guys delicious and sometimes questionable art tips and advice which I have received from multiple sources all cobbled into my own experiences in the wonderful world of art creation. 

For my next trick, I will be demonstrating to you how to do something that keeps many artists awake at night. They lie in bed, thinking about the horrors of drawing something so terrifying, so horrific, that it makes the mind bend and unravel at the seams … Yes … we will be talking about drawing backgrounds/scenery! 

You have probably heard the horror stories when it comes to character artists like me STRUGGLING to draw backgrounds or landscapes and I am here to reassure you that … it actually isn’t that bad. No, I’m serious, don’t click away–

But before we begin, I need to introduce a few concepts to you. There are many others, but these are the ones I have found to be the most important when discussing composition in landscapes. These are what I like to call the Hierarchy of Layers, the Nine Squares of Love, and The End Dots. In common art terms, we label these as Foreground/Middleground/Background, Rule of Thirds, and Vanishing Points/Perspectives, but that’s okay. My terms are better in my not so humble opinion. But for the sake of consistency, I’m gonna use the official terms. So, what do they mean? 

All of these look a little something like this:  

Woah. Okay, that’s a lot. Let’s break each of these ideas down! 

So, the first thing to note is this: The foreground, middleground, and background! This basically denotes where all of the layers of the scene are. The foreground is the thing which is the closest to the hypothetical ‘camera,’ the middleground is the, well, middle part of the scene, and the background is the furthest away. Basically, here are some examples of me breaking down a few pieces: 

However, there is one additional thing to note, the horizon line. This invisible line usually appears where the sky meets the background, which you can see here: 

With this in mind, let me introduce you to the next concept, the Rule of Thirds. Generally speaking, this idea is founded upon the idea that most good compositions are framed in thirds. These are usually illustrated by a 3×3 grid, and it encompasses the whole piece. In art and in photography, people use this grid to create an image that appeals visually to a person, and for some fucking reason, humans are attracted to things coming in threes. We’re weird like that.  

However, with this in mind, as I’m sure you’ve noticed (or maybe you haven’t, Idk), the horizon line and the top line in the grid are almost aligned: 

Why is this important? When it comes to composition, these lines naturally guide our eyes around the image. If I were to cut a line through the centre of the image and draw the horizon there, it would look off. It’s not something you can just explain, but most people can tell the difference between these two images:

The best way I can explain it is that we, as humans, naturally know that if we were looking from this view, the mountains wouldn’t be in the position of the first image because that’s not how perspective works. We know when a drawing or painting looks good, almost instinctively. Obviously, some of this is also up to subjective opinion, but humans are able to tell when something just looks wrong. It’s why the uncanny valley bothers a lot of people so much. The entire point of learning how composition works is to develop the ability to translate that natural ability into the ability to recreate it. 

But with that in mind, we can move onto the final concept. Vanishing Points and Perspective. If you’ve taken a Drawing I or Intro to Drawing class, you are probably familiar with this concept, but here is a refresher. Vanishing Points are relatively straightforward to explain; They are invisible dots where the lines of a piece meet. However, vanishing points serve to illustrate Perspective. What does that mean?? To demonstrate, here is an example of Two Point Perspective: 

“Where are the dots?? Or the lines??” You might be asking. Well, let’s zoom out… 

Right here.

They are kind of far apart, as you can see, and waaaaaaaay off the page. And the kicker is that the position of these lines can and will change depending on the scene you are trying to illustrate. Depending on where the ‘camera’ is, the perspective will change drastically.

Now, back to my original image here.

You can also see perspective and vanishing points being used here as well on the bridge of the building. And besides that, there isn’t much of a need for these perspective lines, mostly because the landscape is more distant. Vanishing Points and Perspective are usually reserved for structures that are closer to the camera such as buildings or trees or anything else, really. 

However, having said all of that, we are missing one crucial thing … 

“Colours? Rendering? Lighting? Anything to make it look like it’s not a sketch?” 

Someday I’m going to kill that guy… 

This part is a bit tricky because it involves a little something called colour theory, which I briefly covered in Part 5 of this illustrious series of (shiet) tutorials. At some point I will really have to do a better colouring tutorial and give better advice, but I still think it’s worthwhile to check out. However, if you are replicating a real-life place, then you should use the colours of that place. I feel like that’s obvious, but then again, some of y’all are dumb as piss so– 

However, because my piece is of a fictional place, I did what I preach to every single one of you fucks every time I make one of these and, say it with me, I USED REFERENCES!!!! I found images of a sunset behind a mountain and a castle, found the colours that made the most sense to use for this piece, and badda-bing-badda-boom. Again, references are your best friend and if I ever say, “references suck,” please shoot me. Unironically. 

Please. 

But with all of these techniques combined, you can create some really cool art!

Hopefully y’all took something from this ramble yet again. This is the final art tips piece for this volume, so I will see y’all in the next one in February! 

Bye for now, fellow birbs!

(Also, if y’all wanna read more about this, here are some funky links, oKAY BYE–) 

https://drawpaintacademy.com/understanding-composition-for-artists/ 

https://doncorgi.com/blog/vanishing-point-in-art/ 

https://drawpaintacademy.com/foreground-middleground-background/