Daily Life in Anime Background Design by Luc

This course is a practical guide to painting anime-style backgrounds that feel alive. Instead of just copying a photo, you’ll learn how to build a scene from the ground up, starting with the essential elements: sky, trees, and earth. Then, you’ll take that same scene and explore how it changes with different times of day, weather, and seasons. It’s about understanding the rules of light and color so you can create any mood you want.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Create and customize your own Photoshop brushes for a faster workflow.
• Paint key background elements: sky, clouds, mountains, trees, grass, and bushes.
• Render a cityscape with buildings, lighting, and foreground details.
• Change the mood of a scene by painting morning, evening, and night variations.
• Add weather effects like rain and sun exposure to your illustrations.

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic familiarity with digital painting and Photoshop.
• Tools: Drawing tablet, Lazy Nezumi Pro (optional but recommended).
• Hardware: Computer capable of running Photoshop.

📝 Description

This isn’t a theory-heavy class. Luc focuses on the practical, hands-on process of painting backgrounds. You’ll start by getting comfortable with your tools, learning how to create custom brushes that fit your personal style. From there, you’ll break down the most common elements of any outdoor scene: the sky, greenery, and the ground. Luc shows you his specific techniques for painting clouds, mountains, trees, and grass without making them look muddy or flat.

The real value comes in the second half of the course. You’ll take a finished countryside scene and a cityscape and learn to repaint them under different conditions. You’ll see exactly how the lighting and color palette shift for a rainy day versus a sunny afternoon, or for a quiet evening versus a dark night. This process teaches you to think like a visual storyteller, using the environment to set the tone. By the end, you’ll have a solid, repeatable workflow for creating any background you can imagine.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Illustrators who want to add convincing backgrounds to their character art.
• Beginners who feel overwhelmed by environment painting and need a structured, step-by-step approach.
• Artists looking to understand how light, color, and weather affect a scene’s mood.

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Luc is a freelance illustrator specializing in background art. His work focuses on capturing atmosphere through light, texture, and small details. He is a Grand Prize winner of the 2021 CALPICO® Package Contest. Luc believes that drawing skills are developed through effort and constant research, not just talent.

🏁 Final Result

• A portfolio of background studies, including a countryside scene and a cityscape, each painted in multiple variations (morning, evening, night, rain).
• A set of custom Photoshop brushes tailored for environment painting.
• A repeatable workflow for designing and rendering any anime-style background.

📢 Guys, this is a Group Buy campaign, check the GBC forum thread to get access

You can find the course preview in the download section below.