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Fantasy Backgrounds:Designing Buildings
In this tutorial I'm going to take a look at a specific set of elements used (by me!) in designing cities.
Much of this style was developed while working on my Tree City Project. It is my plan
to add additional city styles/elements as I have time and/or if any other artists contribute them.
The way I found easiest to work is to collect the buildings in pieces so you can
mix and match them for variety. For example how many ways can you find to draw windows?
Are the square? Round? How many panes of glass (if they have glass) do they have? Do they open?
If so how? Maybe you want to show hinges. Do they have shutters or blinds? (Of course this
much detail on windows isn't necessary if you are drawing the buildings from farther away.
One fast way I draw buildings is to develop several bases as shown in the top part of the example
below. You can see several round and square, short and tall ideas as well as a simple cone shape that
could be used for a roof... and two ideas for smoke stack shapes.
 The lower part of the example image (now above) shows how you can build on these ideas by combining them as well as some other elements like clumps of grass, smoke, mushrooms etc. With a little color and a good number of elements even simple drawings like these can show the feeling of the "city". For example if you drew a city out of variations of the far left building - the one with the grass growing over it and dark windows - the picture might have a more forgotten and overgrown look. The next type of building could be used in city of tree people (actually making it part of a tree) and you could build on ideas like this such as making cave dwelling people etc. Far right house above looks a little more "comfy" and happy and lived in (due to the colors and the smoke). And lastly that little brown house at the bottom left looks like it could be a native hut. Concept Stages... Concepts like those noted above could be taken to a more detailed/advanced level. For my Tree City Project I did a number of sketches, black and white and color ideas before I did a finished painting. And even after that I continued to sketch a number of the tree houses over again to improve them and add details.
 The image above shows a few of the design stages I went through for the project. I started by creating a sketch with every element I could think of thrown in. I then refined it to a sketch with notes (upper left), followed by a rough done in marker to show the lights and darks I wanted (upper right). I then did a number of roughs including one completely alternate design (lower left) before I did the finished painting (lower right). If you look at the details on the Tree City Project you can see how I used ideas from a number of roughs as well as my alternate design in my finished painting.
Moods & details Below is a sample image showing parts of a number of building images I've done. As you can see you can create a background setting using a very simple image with some color, try variations of building design using towers and mushrooms, use perspective (see perspective tutorials) to plan an image and then detail it and so forth. The level of detail on your buildings and cities is up to you. You can start with a simple idea, like the little houses shown in this tutorial, and build it to a more detailed image... adding textures, and even getting down to the details of door knobs and door bells.
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