Introduction

Hi, welcome to this tutorial.

I’m going to teach you how to illustrate an abandoned place quickly and efficiently. Some of us (most of us) don’t have lot of architectural knowledge, and in some cases, we don’t even know perspective, so thinking of drawing backgrounds might seem like a very difficult task.

But don’t worry, for this tutorial we are going to use my favorite trick: 3D models!

 

Sometimes we can’t find (or afford) the models we need in the assets store and using references just doesn’t cut it. The answer to our problems is the Sketchup Warehouse.

 

Sketchup and the 3D Warehouse

The Skethup Warehouse is a magic place where users from all over the world post 3D models that we can easily manipulate (rotate, zoom in, edit) in the Sketchup app or the Desktop Sketchup viewer. Although Sketchup users need a license to build and edit models from scratch, the app and desktop viewer are free and so are the models on the 3D Warehouse.

 

Here’s the link to one of my favorite collections, that will also be of use if you want to put this tutorial on practice.

Here you can turn any model into lines or lines an shadows just with a couple of clicks.

You can also manipulate the shadows’ direction and the line thickness as well as some other details of the model.

Use your fingers or your mouse to rotate the model and zoom in/out to your liking. For this tutorial I’m going to use this model as a base. It would be even easier to use the model as it is, however to make something look truly unique, we must use our artistic skills to enhance what we already have.

Linework

For this part, I used a brush that gave me some randomness in the line control. Linework for abandoned places doesn’t have to look perfect, so a brush like this one helps a lot.

 

As you can see, the line weights are different from each other and I even added some cracks here and there.

Coloring

The next step is blocking the main colors, lights and shadows.

It looks pretty good there, but in order to make it look old and abandoned, it needs some dirt.

You can achieve this dirty looking effect with the noise brush that comes by default with Clip Studio Paint.

The dirty spots were made using the Atuo-Select tool (All the layers option) after using the noise brush. The Auto-select tool will pick only small groups of pixels and using a darker color you will get that “dirty spot” look.

If the borders are too rough you can blend them using the “Gouache blender” (also comes by default)

It’s looking good now, however, the colors are not quite it. My favorite shortcut for quick color fixing is to use a gradient map.

I use a downloaded preset as a base and tweak it until the colors look good enough to me.

Now for it to look truly abandoned, we need to add some weeds and grass. I use the default “Leaves” brush of Clip Studio along with a custom brush from the set below to make them.

After that, I add some more to the the background as well as some ground and that’s it.

Now, to make it look truly mysterious there’s nothing better than the night.

I used a multiply layer with the “Night Sky” gradient from the gradient tool. In order to make our ruins pop, select the ruins and with a lighter color airbrush around the model, specially in the areas where the light hits so it doesn’t look so dark. here you can see a before and after.

Effects

For this part of the tutorial, we are going to add some lighting effects to make our illustration look better.

Create a new layer and set it to “Glow Dodge”, using a lighter color, airbrush around to create the “Moonlight effect”

Add some sparkles on a new “Glow Dodge” layer with the “Droplet” default brush.

Repeat the step above on a new layer and use the “Gaussian blur” effect to create out of focus sparkles.

With the “Cloud” Brush, and a desaturated blue-ish color, add some fog to your ruins to make them look even more mysterious and abandoned.

Add some stars to the sky and you’re done!

It should look great now, however a crucial final step (at least for me) is a little color correction with a layer correction mode. Here I’m using “Tone Curve” and just by moving and playing around with the curves I got a fantastic result.

And, that’s it!

Great, we’ve done it!

 

You can use this method with any structure and place, just make sure to follow the steps :D

 

I hope this tutorial helped you!

 

You can find the Timelapse video here. I intended on making this a full video tutorial but I found out too late about the deadline :P

 

Until next time!