Drawing Backgrounds For Comics - Drawing a Room from Multiple Angles

When working on a comic, you'll have to draw rooms from multiple angles depending on where your characters are standing. I used to just approach each page with the mindset that I would probably remember where things go in a room based on other panels, but very quickly realized that this led to me making a lot of small but noticeable mistakes.

 

This is one of the methods I like to use to make the process of drawing a room from multiple angles much simpler.

The Floor Plan

To start, I make a floor plan of the room I'm planning to draw. This includes some basic rectangles to represent all the furniture.

It helps to label everything and give furniture its own color so it stands out from the rest of the sketch. If you really want to be efficient, give every piece of furniture its own unique color so you can tell them apart even better. I also marked roughly where I'd like to put the windows in the room with the little yellow tickmarks.

 

For this example I went with a very simple rectangular room, but this method also works with rooms of any shape. Heavily overlapping walls may be a little more difficult to decipher in future steps using this method, though, so try it and see if it works out for your room.

 

Save this sketch somewhere you won't lose it!

The Walls

With the floorplan drawn out, you can now go ahead and make several sketches to represent the walls of your room. This simple rectangular room only has four walls, so I only did four sketches.

Make sure you save these somewhere you won't lose them, too!

Distorting the Images

With everything drawn out, now is the time to make a new canvas. Place your floorplan on the canvas and make sure there's plenty of room surrounding it.

Now, using the Free Transform tool, stretch out your floorplan in the desired direction so it appears to recede back into space like a real floor. In Clip Studio Paint, you can use the Perspective transform to keep the proportions accurate while you do this, though you may also want to use Free Transform or Skew to get it at the desired angle.

Once the floor is at the angle you want, you can go ahead and do the same thing with the walls. Make sure the bottom edges of the walls line up with the edges of the floorplan.

Since I did this freehand, the sketch is not in accurate perspective (though it does look deceptively close!).

Perspective Ruler

To compensate for the inaccuracies of my perspective, I used Clip Studio Paint's Perspective Rulers to do a second layer of sketching. This particular angle I used is one point perspective, meaning that the perspective is only based on a singular point on the horizon line. To correct the perspective, I simply turned on the one point perspective ruler and dragged the angled rulers until they fit pretty close to the edges of the walls in my sketch, making sure the center node on the horizon line was roughly in the middle of my drawing.

As you can see, the perspective looked pretty decent before, but was actually a little bit off. You can make sure your ruler is positioned perfectly by lining up the two angled rulers with the top and bottom edge of one of the side walls.

 

Once the ruler is in position, all of the lines you draw in Clip Studio Paint will follow that ruler, keeping everything in perspective.

Now you can go ahead and do a new, cleaner sketch over the old one. At this point, you can also start to draw in the shapes that you marked on your floorplan. Even if the objects aren't rectangular, I find it helpful to draw a box at roughly the same dimensions anyways first and then change it to a different shape later.

Final

With the ruler still in place, you can now go ahead and ink your room.

 

What makes this approach really useful is that you can now go ahead and use the floorplan you saved earlier to create multiple different room angles!

Here's an example of one room from two different angles. All you have to do is skew the floorplan differently and match up the perspective rulers to figure out how to draw your new room angle!

Thank you for reading!