Intro

 

Hello, I hope you guys are doing well.

I think a lot of people, including me, struggle with drawing and coloring background. I know, it’s time consuming, we have to apply lots of perspective rules and it also requires lots of skills and imagination (if we don’t use reference). That’s why I come up with an idea of turning a photo to an anime background, which I find very convenient and effectively. Now let’s get started!

Step 1: Auto action and blending

First, we take a photo that we want to turn into anime background. If possible, choose photo that doesn’t or have less people in it because it’ll be harder to edit human figure to look like an anime character. That’s why I reccomend taking photos without human figures at all. But if there're some people in your photo, don’t worry, you can either erase them, blur them or replace with anime characters, it’s all good.

Next, we need to download this auto action from clip studio

Open clip studio paint, drag it from download to auto action section and hit the play button.

Below is our photo after auto action

Of course the result is kinda disappointed because the photo still looks realistic and it also causes lots of noise effect on the sky, the road, the cars. And the trees seem to have no change at all

Now, use default blend tool of clip studio paint to get rid of those effect, make your photo looks smoother.

Blur any unecessary details from the photo. To get a better result, of course it’ll take you more time but in my opinion it still not takes as much time as I render a full background.

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This is my photo after blending most of the ugly noise by blend brush.

Step 2: Redraw

Now I need to redraw the details that I deleted such as electricity cables, road line and trees. I also draw some clouds to make the picture less empty. Remember to add shadow and highlight when you draw trees and adjust the color pallet to make it fit with the environment. In this case, the photo is taken at noon so I use dark green and light yellow to draw trees.

If you have a hard time choosing color, use eyedropper tool and pick color from photo constantly while adjust it however you want.

Below are two brushes I use to draw trees.

Creating a new layer to draw clouds. After finishing the clouds, duplicate layer (Ctrl + J ), then from menu bar, choose Filter => Blur => Gaussian blur.

Adjust strength until you satisfy then click Ok. Now move this layer under the original cloud layer and merge. This tenchique create the outer glow effect for the clouds.

 

If you want to save time, you can always use non copyrighted anime sky material, which is easily found in clip studio assets and on the internet.

Here are cloud brushes I use:

Step 3: Final effect

Let’s add some more final effects to bring anime-feel to your photo! First off, create a new layer on top, change Blending mode to “Screen”.

Next, draw bokeh and light particles for the background. Also, you can use air brush (soft) to draw sunlight and even adding more glow for objects in the picture. For day time, I usually choose light yellow or light green for this effect

Let’s take a look at the final result!

Below is another examples showing sunlight and bokeh effect

Though it’s already included in the first video, I want to upload a timelapse of another photo showing my process of turning it to an anime background. Enjoy!

That’s everything for the tutorial. I hope you guys enjoy and have fun creating your own anime background after watching my video. Good luck ^ 3 ^

 

Mikarin