2D Toolkit: Drawing Environments from Reference, Photobashing and Values

Drawing Environments from a Reference:

Drawing an environment from a live reference, for me, is a unique challenge, particularly when said drawing must abide to a quick time frame. I find it difficult to capture the essence of an environment and struggle in the quick description of perspective and scale, the latter being of particular difficulty. This is a skill that can only be trained through practice; in the building of a visual library and in full understanding of perspective and scale, as well as confidence in transcribing these elements of a scene into a piece.

I have created several rough sketches of different environments throughout Confetti. Due to the aforementioned difficulty I face in these timed exercises, I tried to describe the wider form of a scene, blocking out the rough shapes whilst removing much of the detail. Ultimately, these are incredibly rough descriptions and are not of a high quality; nonetheless they provided to be practice for fundamental drawing principles.

After this exercise, I went about creating several other sketches showing other environments. One of these environments was that of my bedroom desk, the other an exterior shot of a graveyard in the village I live in. In these sketches, similar to those of Confetti, I tried to create thin and sketchy facsimiles of the the image I based my sketch off. I also did rough value paints to show where light and dark areas of the scene lay, and to separate the for, mid and background planes of the scene.

Photobashing and Values:
Photobashing is the process of using image editing techniques to merge multiple source image into one, creating a unique scene that incorporates environmental aspects from the source images together. This can be used in environment painting, to create textures in designs or models, or widely in concept art that uses such photos to create quick and realistic scenes that illustrate unique environments.

Values can be used strongly in photobashing, with grey scale effects able to assist in the more seamless blend of multiple source images together. This can also be used to gain a better understanding of where the foreground, mid ground and background planes lay. In this sense, then, there are primary values that are used across the piece: lighter in the foreground and darker in the background. The word "value", in this usage, refers to the difference between the different tones used: the "lightest" value may nonetheless be a dark tone, yet so long as this tone is lighter than that in the mid and back planes, it remains the lightest value in the piece. 
In this setup, grey scale values should be linear: they should travel, from lightest to darkest, in a scale from white to black. As such, the tone of a value can clearly be seen. This is useful, as the precise tone between values is an important point of consideration: values, as shown below, may bear light and dark highlights/shadow tones used throughout the piece; the lightest tone on any given value should be no lighter than the darkest tone of its higher value, and the darkest should be no darker than the lightest highlight on the value below it. This distinction between values pushes the contrast in a piece, allowing for greater juxtaposition to be seen between the three different planes. 

As shown above, the highlight on any given value is no lighter than the darkest tone seen on the value to its left. The darkest tone of any given value is no darker than the highlight seen on the tonal value to its right.

I used this to create a tonal paint over of an image I photobashed, utilising two source images I took previously to do so. In doing this exercise, when photobashing the two source images together, I utilised Photoshop's "Levels" functionality to alter the contrast and darkness seen in the grey scale piece, using this alongside some blending techniques to settle the two images in together. In the paint over, I used the polygonal lasso tool to draw over the large shapes in the scene, then filling these shapes in with the light and dark tones I selected for my palette. Ultimately, I feel I could have pushed the darkness between the mid ground and background planes a bit more, but otherwise this paint over illustrates how such values can be used to rapidly create a scene.