More Comic Backgrounds

I could do these things all day. They don't take long, and you get the immediate payoff of a freestanding piece of art that you can plop into version control, feeling the warm glow of accomplishment. 

Unfortunately, there is other art to be done that requires more thought (oh god we're redesigning the Overland Map and trying to figure out how everything is going to look), so my job does not end at comic backgrounds and forest monsters.

Undergrounds of the earthen variety. 

Spooooky crypt. Monsters can't resist a good spooky crypt. They're drawn to it like hipsters to artisanal pizza.

Outside our living room window, I love that time of day when just the tops of the trees are lit.  

Spoooooky forest. 

A morthagi-building workshop. This is where the unspeakable horror magic happens!

"I'd love to go questing with you, but I'm swamped right now."

I realized that we have like twenty forest backgrounds and almost no rocky backgrounds.

Nothing ominous about a room full of treasure, no sir. Nothing at all.

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Sometimes I lose track of myself and I end up making something that's less of a comic background and more of a mediocre attempt at an impressionist painting. The first draft of a "rolling green hills" background looked like this:

Even though I'm using sweeping lines and trying to keep things simple, there are a couple things not working here.

The sky is just too "standard," there's no stylization going on there.

And any time you have a background with a blue sky and green ground, get suspicious. Some people can pull it off, but more likely, your background is boring—change the color of something, anything, and see if it gets more interesting.

A second pass tried to get things more abstract and pulled the color palette in a bit (the blue is gone and the yellow has been desaturated). While it may not be as "pretty" as the first one, it fits with the other comic backgrounds better and lets the viewer do a little more of the fun inferential work.

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Bonus: adding foreground pieces so that our heroes can stand on them and look out over the hills, brooding heroically: