Backstage Pass #22 (Patreon)

On this edition of Backstage Pass, I'll be talking about…

Pre-made backgrounds! Aka, one of my favorite timesavers for comicking.

Those with sharp eyes may have noticed much of OBT's backgrounds are, well, reused. This is probably one of my biggest secret (but not actually secret) time savers for the comic! Each background takes anywhere from 1-2 hours to make, which while needing a little bit of initial commitment, really expedites the process. It also helps me ground the characters on screen, giving me a space to plop them without having to worry too much about keeping consistent staging (which I also struggle with sometimes, don’t look too close at where they’re standing in relation to other panels lmao). Here are some of my current recurring backgrounds!:

Yohann’s Yurt is expected to be recurring…… Eventually. The outfits on the mannequins and fabric on the loom are all on separate layers, which will make it easy to swap out depending on when we come back here in the comic! It lets me keep things cycling and fresh, so it doesn’t seem static.

The Marowak Dojo exterior was recently color corrected for the new palette of the comic, and used to have an environmental background until I decided it was easier to create the environment around it and tweak colors for it there directly, such as here when I wanted to use my sunset grass palette and not just an overlay:

I also have made pre-rendered backgrounds for interior locations for Marowak Dojo, such as the lobby entrance:

And the combat training room:

All of these backgrounds tend to have toggleable layers, so for the combat room I can toggle the doorway off if I want a solid wall for another angle, and remove the bench if it’s in the way visually.

Fun fact though, you know what location I don’t have a pre-rendered background for? Wigglytuff’s Guild! And also Sharpedo Bluff. While I intend to fix this eventually, in the meantime I just reuse panels from backgrounds and make minor edits. This was the method I used for the longest time, but sometimes I don’t always render the background behind a character, which makes reusing the background for other panels a pain.