Technical Post - PBH Background Process (Patreon)

Hello everyone! It's me again, adi! I hope you have all been well. New month, new technical post! I wanted to share with you the art process for how I tackle backgrounds.

I personally don't think I'm a very skilled background artist. I put all my stat points into 'anime girls smiling at 3/4 angles', so I struggle with anything else really! Even so, for Please Be Happy I wanted to do these backgrounds myself. I really wanted to try and capture the city with a wide variety of backgrounds, and for b...budget reasons, a bit of pride, and my Art Vision for the game, I am the background artist for Please Be Happy.

Every time it was tough, I had a voice in my head tell me 'it's not about being technically perfect, it's about establishing locations' and that's what's getting me through these. It's really hard, okay! I want to be a better background artist!

PBH backgrounds can loosely be separated into two categories... 'adi struggles by herself' and 'hui is the best and helps adi'.

Hui, if you remember, was one of the background artists for Heart of the Woods. She did the beautiful fairy clearing background, Maddie's cabin room, the antique shop, Morgan's kitchen and a couple others - if you've played a more recent build, she did the updated Morgan's bedroom bg, too!

At first, I thought I'd do every single background on my own, with no help, but it was too difficult to balance on top of story direction, side character sprites, cgs, game scripting... Sometimes, you just gotta let others help!!! So that's what I've done. Hui's working on a background as I type this too, and I'm excited to get into it!

So, one of the pre-Hui backgrounds is the kitchen background.

This is Juliet's home kitchen! While she's pretty mild for a vampire, all things considered, she really likes her vampy colours for her house. While any rooms meant for other people are decorated with brighter wallpaper, such as the library proper, any rooms not meant for guests tend to have darker wallpaper.

To research Juliet's home, I went to Nairn Street Cottage down in Wellington. It's a lovely cottage that was build by some of the earliest British settlers, and I highly recommend you visit! I intended to visit the Katherine Mansfield House in my most recent trip to Wellington but I am weak with low energy (and I was desperate to finish Collar x Malice and it's fandisk).

You can see a reference I worked off of here!

First thing's first, a thumbnail sketch! I did about 3-4 on one canvas, super tiny. I really don't have a head for perspective, but I find that I need to at least try and know where elements are before putting the perspective in.

I got ambitious and tried to do 2-point perspective.

I realized that was foolish of me and did this. I... think this one is just eyeballed perspective with the horizon line and vanishing point? It's been a little while since I did this background.

Then I set up the CSP perspective ruler and do a cleaner sketch. I remember dreading this background so much because of the chairs. Chairs... in perspective... my nightmare...

I even went to SketchUp to help, but uhhhh I'm not very good at SketchUp.

Then I do a colour sketch! I find that it helps to do this before lineart, because I can identify volume issues way better when there's rough shading inside. I also find that I'm happiest with the... painted... look? When I use a hard round brush at about 50-80 opacity when I lay down my colours, with a nice cream as a base to help bring colours together. In case you're curious, I did line, shade and colour the room without the table and chairs too and they're all on a separate layer!

Then it's time for lineart! This was mostly the easiest part and I can turn off my brain for most of it, but the chairs. Mm. Difficult. I don't like chairs.

And then I show the colour sketch under the lineart (black sketchlines and all) and start cleaning it up. This is a pretty tedious part of the process, but I hope it looks good! At the end of this stage, I do all the time of day variants too. I put certain 'extremely obvious lighting' parts on separate layers (or make a painted layer to hide it), like the window light on the table and wall, or the cast shadow of the chairs.

Once I'm all done with that, I chuck on my adjustment layers, paper texture, apply the blur, things like that. This is probably one of the most important steps in giving it that PBH-vibe, and it's usually very quick!

So that's my process for a PBH background, ground up!

In comparison, when I get Hui help, she helps me do a sketch like the one on the left. I almost don't need to worry about scale and perspective, and it really saves me so much time and second guessing. (If you're curious about the books, I use photos and adjust positions and sizes yes. It's about establishing locations!)

Thanks for reading this far, everyone! I hope you enjoyed a bit of insight to my daily struggle (and me being really chatty)! Maybe one day I could try and record the art process for a background...?

adi out! Hope you have a lovely day, everyone, and I hope you find your happiness in these days!