Compose An Anime Street Scene

Tan Hui Tian uses colouring, lighting and perspective techniques to paint an urban setting that’s full of details.

- Tan Hui Tian

Traditional anime backgrounds are painted with poster paints, but increasingly studios are switching to digital tools. Backgrounds are designed to suit the cel-shaded animation in the foreground, and differ from matte-painted backgrounds created for films in that there are more hand-painted elements, and the colours are more saturated.

For this workshop I’ll be describing my process for creating an anime-style background. It would be good if you had an awareness of basic perspective concepts, such as how to set up a simple two-point perspective grid.

1 Compositional sketch

I start off by searching for inspiration on Pinterest, searching online and going through my reference folders. I decide to do a common scene in anime: a quiet street in daylight. I have a rough composition in mind, and sketch it out with a simple brush. At this stage, I have a two-point perspective in mind, but choose not to use a perspective grid yet, so that the sketch can be more dynamic.

2 Moving on to colour flats

I then lay down colour flats in different layers. I often merge components that aren’t touching into a single layer, to reduce the layer count. I use the Lasso and Paint Bucket tools to create the shapes. At this stage there’s no need for all the shapes to be precise. It’s more important to create tonal contrasts and interesting shapes.

3 Working to the correct perspective

Once I have the shapes more or less pinned down, I then correct them according to the perspective grid. You can create a perspective grid with the Filter>Vanishing Point tool in Photoshop. For this, I use the Polygon Tool on the Star setting with 100 sides and 99 per cent indented sides.