As an illustrator I’m often asked to draw or paint a variety of things so continual learning is a must.

Backgrounds are a skill I always felt I could improve so I decided to finally put my head down and try and plow through the 21-day Environmental Design workout by Nathan Fowkes offered by Schoolism, an online subscription-based artistic education. It probably won’t be my last as it was definitely an eye-opener to all the different approaches of backgrounds Nathan showed.

With the exception of a few lessons, each video was approximately an hour long. Nonetheless I found it took me much longer to paint, sometimes 3 to 4 hours or more. Following Nathan was a bit of a challenge for me as he flit about the digital canvas, rapidly changing brushes, and following along the applied adjustment layers. I found myself pausing and rewinding often.

While Nathan doesn’t provide the brushes themselves, he walks you through most of his settings. When the opportunity arose, it was easy enough to take a snapshot of the brush on screen and duplicate the configuration. One thing I noticed that would occasionally throw me off was brush strokes suddenly appearing as if some frames leading to them had been dropped although the narration did not suffer from it. I would rewind to see if I blinked but I chalk it up to creative editing.

While the style is different than what I’m used to, I found it to be quite educational and will definitely incorporate some of the things I learned into my own work. Below are a handful of the studies I did of Nathan’s compositions. I don’t want to spoil it for others taking the course. I painted these all in Photoshop.

I was recently asked if I would be interested in working on something with a romance theme so I thought I would get in some practice by drawing screenshots of romantic TV shows I've watched. These particular shots were referenced from The Grand Hotel. It's a great show that had me hooked from the moment I started watching it. There's romance, comedy, and suspense, and the main actors have such great chemistry that I wanted to try my hand at capturing some of the intimate scenes. Drawing snapshots of scenes is a great way to learn composition, lighting, and story.

I sketched a number of scenes using blue pencils. After posting up my drawings, it was suggested that I add some mood lighting so I brought them into Photoshop for inking and colouring. I decided to do a completely different take than what I saw in the first scene by using colours to suggest passion. I thought purples and pinks might be one way to go. One wouldn't think this would work but I think it did.

For the second image, I tried to interpret the existing lighting and colours into comic flats such as swapping out black hair with blue, etc. This was definitely a useful exercise. The more I draw something the more I hope to commit it to memory.

Chalk Full of Dreams