The Letter's Background Process

[Yangyang Mobile]

Since we're approaching the deadline of our Kickstarter (6 days left!), we thought we'd share about our background process. That's right. We'll walk you through and through as to how our dedicated, talented artists spend sweat, blood and tears into breathing a magnificent BG art into The Letter. Don't feel too bad; it's actually their pleasure!  [:D]

The Letter's Background Process



2D Thumbnails

We start off by planning our background composition and layout with thumbnail sketches. For the Ermengarde Mansion parlour, our lead artist (Eko) drew four quick sketches for us to choose from, putting only the larger objects that will be present in the scene. We decided to go with the fourth one for our next step.



3D Layout

After picking a thumbnail to work from, our background artist (Czar) will now start layouting the scene in 3D. While we can certainly manually draw the scene line by line, using a 3D program to construct the scene helps speed up the process and allows us to easily add smaller objects to enhance the atmosphere. In this case, we added the wine table, candelabras, vase, and a clock to fill the empty space! Now that the basic layout is done, we now move on to the lineart!



Lineart

This is a pretty straightforward process: From our 3D program we now switch to Photoshop and start drawing our lineart based on the scene we created! We also modified parts of the lineart such as the window and the door, and drew it consistently with the design style of our mansion. Smaller details are also drawn manually such as the embellishments on the tables.

Flat Colors

Next we start planning our colors! Since our mansion is mostly consisted of warm colors, we decided go with the same ambience (notice how in the image the walls were originally supposed to be of a green color?). Once that is done, we can now finally start rendering the whole background!



Rendering

This is the process that took the most time in the entire background drawing process. Here we start to paint everything in the scene and slowly bring it to a detailed finish that is still consistent with the other backgrounds’ style! (Those patterns on the walls are actually made from our background artist’s sketch of Saitama from One-Punch Man! Cool, huh?)



Lighting

Many hours and three cups of coffee later, we can now add the lighting and make final adjustments to the illustration.



Final Adjustments

Lastly, we make adjustments to the whole picture to keep colors harmonious and bring out certain parts of the picture. 

Congratulations, you now have your background! What do you think? If you have any criticisms or suggestions, please feel free to comment them down below!

[Xelestial]

Interesting! Thanks for sharing.