Introduction

Drawing fantasy background can be daunting to a lot of people, and I hope that in this tutorial you are able to have some insights on how to draw a fantasy background.

 

Fantasy Elements

What makes Fantasy, Fantasy?

 

The word fantasy refers to:

• An illusion or an imaginative idea.

• It contains imaginary and unrealistic elements

• Events in a fantasy operate outside the laws of the real universe and typically involve supernatural elements, like magic or magical creatures, ancient myths, legends, and fairy tale

 

With these in mind, fantasy means it can be anything, in my opinion, the only limit is your imagination. A good rule of thumb to make something seems fantastical is to include elements that you don’t usually see in our physical realities.

 

It is good to look into multiple varieties of media to inspire you when brainstorming ideas. Personally, I love to get inspiration from movies, TV series, webtoons/manga as well as from my favorite artists. To name a few, I love the concepts in Treasure Planet and Arcane, and I love to get environment/landscape inspirations from artists like Rossdraws and phlipsue_Art and john_stone.art.

 

To design something, it is best to do some concept artwork first before jumping into drawing the whole environment piece.

 

For this tutorial, I am going to draw a fantasy environment where there are gigantic teal trees with tree houses built around these trees. To make it more fantastical, I want these houses to be built on top of floating rocks.

 

Here is a simple concept sketch. It doesn’t need to be clean and fully detailed, but it is good to think of some world-building stuff behind it as well as sketch a few concepts out. This is good to kickstart the brainstorming process on what do you want to include in your environment piece.

 

Composition of a Landscape

Before we jump into drawing “fantasy” background, one has to understand what makes up a background, or should I say a “landscape” or an “environment” illustration.

 

I am no expert, but throughout my learning days as an artist, I think what makes up a landscape consists of 3 important things: Foreground, Midground and Background. Foreground, Midground and Background creates a sense of depth in a drawing, it gives the viewer the ability to “travel” when looking at the piece.

 

Here are some short and sweet bullet points of what is a foreground/background/midground.

 

Foreground:

• Closer to the viewer’s eye

• Allows viewer to see more details

• Larger in size as it placed close to the viewer

 

Background:

• Furthest away from the viewer’s eye

• Viewer sees lesser details due to atmospheric perspective (the dust and particles in the air make it seems blurred out and blend into the environment around it)

• Smaller in size

 

Midground:

• Between the foreground and background

• Act as a connecting space between foreground and background

• Contains minor details, to complement both foreground and midground

 

The reason why we have to understand these 3 important elements is so that we are able to imagine how things could be placed in a drawing. And this is able to help us to arrange objects in the scene more effectively.

 

Composition and thumbnailing

One of the first steps to do when drawing a landscape is to do thumbnailing, by placing big shapes using different values to distinguish your foreground, midground, and background.

 

Thumbnailing is a good first step for artists to construct the composition of the piece without going into too much detail. It is also advised to do thumbnailing in small canvases, e.g. 300px by 300px for square canvas.

 

Your canvas can be horizontal or vertical, this totally depends on your own taste.

Horizontal canvas tends to give a more cinematic feel and it also gives a wide shot of an environment.

 

As for vertical canvas, it tends to be more of a poster-kind of illustration, this is suitable when an environment shot is best conveyed in a vertical form such as a very tall ancient architecture or a bottom-to-top view of forest with mystical tall trees and creatures flying around.

When doing thumbnailing, do use these swatches to distinguish your foreground, midground and background. Darkest value for the foreground and the lightest value for the background

 

Here are some examples of thumbnailing.

 

With this as a first step, I did some brainstorming to figure out what I liked.

 

After a few thoughts, I decided to choose the second composition on the first row and separated each swatch into a different layer.

 

 

With these swatches separated into different layers, it is time that we refine and add some details to the shapes so we can have a better picture of how should we be taking our next step. You can turn on the alpha lock for each layer to paint in the shapes that we are just established.

These are the loose details that I added. Notice the way the big shapes are placed, this is to lead the viewer's eye to the center of the image.

 

This also indirectly tells a story to the viewer that there are people living on this gigantic tree, giving an impression that there are signs of life and potentially a community or civilization. In other words, adding interesting elements to your environment piece invokes a unique way of storytelling.

I also added a human figure to act as a "Scale" reference, this way your viewers are able to imagine how large the environment is.

Here's a breakdown of the foreground, midground and background respectively:

 

 

Colors

Color is very important in representing the overall mood of the piece, utilizing color psychology. This is the most common mood or emotion associated with these basic colors.

 

❤️Red - Rage, Passion, Excitement, Hot, Energy

🟠Orange - Confidence, Warmth, Success, Bravery, Enthusiasm

🟨Yellow - Happiness, Creativity, Sunshine, Jealousy, Friendship

💚Green - Nature, Healing, Freedom, Growth, New Beginnings

🔷Blue - Peace, Loyalty, Trust, Sadness, Responsibility

🟣Purple - Luxury, Spirituality, Ambition, Imagination, Intuition

 

And so many more. You can also read up on color theory to incorporate colors that work well together when conveying a particular mood or emotion.

 

You can alpha lock the layer to paint the colors you want in the shapes that are blocked out.

 

Here are some demonstrations with different shades of colors, observe how each piece gives off a different mood and vibe.

For my piece, I decided to pick green, teal, and blue as my main color while adding a hint of red to give it a bit more pop, as warm colors are complementary to cool colors, e.g. green's complementary color is red.

 

Rendering process

Here comes the rendering process. I will present a step-by-step guide on how I rendered this piece.

---Adding textures---

 

Turning on the alpha lock on the foreground and midground, I started to paint some textures for the tree trunks. I also started to establish some details and smaller shapes to give the base more of a fuller look.

---Houses---

 

Next, I use a darker color to draw out the shapes of the houses in the places I want them to be.

This is also a good time to experiment with how should one place the objects in their piece to their own liking.

---Painting the base of these houses---

With the silhouettes in place, I started to paint in their base colors.

Since I did not want to complicate the process too much, I only added basic shadows to each house. Imagine how would these houses look like when there is only basic lighting.

---Adding More details shadows and light---

 

With the base down, I started to add in more distinct shadows and light to blend these houses more into the environment.

 

Notice the color of the background is warmer, hence I painted the edges of the houses with warm lighting, while cooler tones for the shadows to blend in more with the tree trunk.

---Adding Leaves, Foliages---

Since this is a piece with trees and plants, I added leaves around the trees.

These are the brushes that I used to paint the leaves.

Remember to paint the darker color first before moving up to lighter colors when painting leaves.

---Continue to add more leave details---

Repeating the same process, I finished up the rest of the background and midground, adding more leaves, vines and other finer details.

For the water below the tree, I started with a gradient, added in some highlights, and then some shadows. You can also add a new Add Glow layer to add lighting variety to your water.

---Adding Clouds to background---

 

I used this brush set to aid myself in drawing beautiful clouds.

For this particular sunset setting, we need to remember that the light from the sun is coming from the bottom hence the bottom part of the cloud is lighter.

---Adding Fog for Atmospheric Perspective---

If you remember in the previous section how it is mentioned that the particles in the air make certain things seem more blurred out.

 

For this part, I used an airbrush and applied to areas where the midground and fore ground intercept.

As you can see, this gives an illusion of depth.

---Final touches---

To make thIs piece even more immersive, I added birds and a person into this painting., this also creates a sense of scale and sign of life.

 

I also play around with settings such as Tone Curve, Color Balance, Posterization, and so on to adjust certain color profiles to my liking. You can right-click on the topmost layer to test out any of the settings.

With that I present you the final piece!

Closing

I hope that this tutorial shows some insights and enable you to learn a few new things when it comes to drawing fantasy background.

 

Until next time Happy Painting!