Adding background to the drawing - dad

 In this blog post I will explain the process of creating the background for the character of the dad. Dad is a sports champion and I thought the most appropriate place for the character to flex is somewhere in front of his trophies and medals. I decided to make a little shelf and a wall with different medals, ribbons and trophies, therefore the backdrop highly reflect on the person and only adds to the design. 

Once again, I started by reducing the opacity of my character and drawing the background over him so I could also tell what is behind him. I wanted the trophies and medals to look childlike because it is still my goal to make this appealing for children. I have created a whole wall.

I thought I did an extremely good job sketching the elements on the wall and exactly like in my previous post, I decided not to outline the elements but just to add color to them. I obviously decided to color the trophies gold. and the ribbons would be purple/pink/red. What i needed to do so the objects do not look too flat, was adding shades behind them.

I have added a separate layer to draw over the sketch I did at first and for this I used the brush called Plume Studio and the paint bucket tool that lets me fill in the outlines. Using the bucket definitely speeds up my work even though it is not always perfect and sometimes I have to draw over the lines a little bit so it is all filled in with the color. 

I have made a mistake when adding the background and the shades for my objects. I think I should do all of it on 3 separate layers, which means a layer for the objects, a layer for the shades and a layer for the wall. I did not think about that and I have done all of that on one layer which really was a lot more difficult to control and by that I mean, the shades needed to be done very precisely so I would not destroy the way the objects look. It was a mistake which caused me a lot of time and struggle in general. Now I know to avoid that mistake in the future so my work process would be quicker. 

For the floor and the wall I decided to use exactly the same colors as I did for the room in my 'mom' image, because I want to give it a feeling that it is all in the same castle/house. I would only create different wall colors for the children's room because I feel like children usually have different wall colors than the parents and the rest of the house. I think it is an important observation. 

This is the final image and I really like the top half, but I feel like there is something missing on the bottom. I might add some sort of decoration or a rug at the bottom of the image.