Fussing Details + Background

While our favorite hanyou takes a lunch break, I can take advantage of his absence to fill in some of the background. I'm a great believer of doing backgrounds, even though I'm utter crap at doing them (at least so far...). However, I'd much rather do this than rely on the heavily over-used "grunge" background so many artists are falling back on here on DA. Seems like every other character portrait has a grungy background, and honestly, it's a technique that I'm beginning to find a bit galling.

Okay, okay, enough grousing. As I said, I'm crap at doing backgrounds, but I gotta say, once I get into it, it's kind of like falling into the landscape. I can "see" it, almost as if I'm there: the trees, the sunlit fields, the mist on the mountain....I just wish I had the skills to get it down with more realism. Sigh. Maybe someday.

In the meantime, I'm learning bucketloads about doing grass, wood, water, mountains, skies, and on and on. Just about the time I think I'm satisfied, I figure out a better way to do it that gets better results. But then, that's what drawing a lot does for you. You just can't get better if you don't draw as much as you possibly can.

Maybe in a year of three, I might actually have eventually worked my way out of craphood and into some small degree of competency. At least I sure hope so!

One of my big efforts while watching the InuYasha DVDs has been screen capturing hundreds and hundreds of background images, and I've used six or seven of them for reference on technique so far. I think I need to find more....