Ryan Estrada

Tip for artists:
If there’s a type of setting you use a lot, make yourself a background library. I’m not talking about finished backgrounds you can reuse, but collections of props you can slide in to fill out and add detail to backgrounds.

For example, I draw a lot of jungles. When I did my comic Mystical Monkey, I sat and individually drew every leaf in the jungle through the whole story. But later on, I made this library of different bunches of leaves, plants, flowers, tree trunks, etc. and put them all on separate layers in a Photoshop file, so I can just drag them into any image I’m working on.

Now, whenever I have to draw a jungle, I need only draw the general area where the characters are standing, then fill the background and foreground with these props. I can rearrange, rotate, flip, recolor, and darken them so that every panel looks different. And I can make them smaller and darker as I get further into the back, greeting a sense of depth. Every once in a while, I make a new prop, and add it to the collection.

I can make a background in 3 minutes that it looks like I spent days on.

I’m slowly building my city library now, for when I have to draw Superhero comics. What backgrounds do you draw a lot? Consider making a background library!