How to Compose a Character Illustration: Scene, Light and Foreground

A finished character is not a finished picture. The moment you have to place that character somewhere, a new set of decisions arrives: where it sits in the frame, what is behind it, where the light comes from, and what the viewer sees first. Alexandra Fintova, who teaches the Character Design Essentials Bundle on Twotap, builds the scene around her character in a fixed sequence, and the sequence is mostly about controlling attention.

Thumbnail the composition, six times

Before any painting she draws six small empty canvases and fills each with a different arrangement. Two decisions come first: portrait or landscape, and where the character sits.

The trick that makes this fast is that she does not redraw the character. She pastes it in as a flat silhouette, so each thumbnail is an exercise in arranging masses rather than drawing. Her comment on the roughness is the right attitude: it does not need to be detailed, it is really about laying down compositions.

She works against the rule of thirds, dividing each canvas into three horizontally and vertically and placing the subject where the lines cross, on the grounds that this is more interesting than putting things in the centre.

Think in three depth layers

Every one of her thumbnails is built from the same three-part structure, which is worth adopting wholesale:

• A blurred background. Color and atmosphere only. As she puts it, blurring it means you do not need to care about it too much.
• A middle element in focus. The thing the character stands on or occupies, in her case a blade of grass.
• A foreground. Silhouettes of leaves or grass, sitting between the viewer and the scene.

That structure produces depth without perspective construction, and it tells you exactly how much detail each element deserves.

Choose the balanced one, and cut the rest

Her selection reasoning is worth reading in full, because it is all about restraint. She picks the thumbnail where the character is not bigger than the grass, because it is more balanced and will be easier to build. She drops an idea she had liked, a sofa in the grass, because it is an unnecessary element. And she keeps the one that lets her play with light from a candle, against grass that curls back over the scene.

Six options, one chosen for balance, one good idea deliberately discarded.

Paint the background as color mixing, then blur

The background is not drawn, it is mixed. Fintova lays broad strokes of color with a large brush, smudges them into each other so there is movement across the frame, then applies a Gaussian blur to the whole thing.

What follows is honest iteration, left in the lesson. Her first attempt reads as if the scene is on fire, so she abandons that palette for black and dark blue, which gives her a night scene. Then she misses dark greens and mixes them in. Then it goes too light, so black returns. Then a little orange, blurred, which suddenly reads as distant lights.

The technique is simple. The judgement is in cycling through it quickly and being willing to throw out a version that is technically fine but says the wrong thing.

Let the value check tell you when the character is disappearing

She keeps a greyscale value check layer in the file, a mid grey layer set to the Color blend mode, and toggles it on after each background change. It immediately shows her that the character's legs have been lost against the dark background.

Her fix works from both sides: lighten a patch of background behind the legs so there is something for them to read against, then go back to the legs themselves, alpha lock them, and lift them slightly. She rechecks in greyscale after each adjustment.

This is what a background is for. Not to be beautiful on its own, but to hold the subject up.

Build light by duplicating and blurring

Her lighting is done with copies rather than special tools. She takes the light she painted inside the lamp, duplicates it, unlocks it, and applies a Gaussian blur, which turns a small painted shape into a soft glow. Scaling it up makes a large light. Duplicating it several times, with one copy sitting in front of the lamp, makes it more intense, and layer opacity dials the strength.

Then the move that makes the light look like light:

• A new layer above everything except the sketch
• Black, painted with a big soft brush all around the lit area
• Gaussian blur

Everything away from the light source falls into shadow, so the lamp is now competing with darkness rather than sitting on an evenly lit picture.

Throw the light back onto the character

To make the character belong in that light, she duplicates and flattens the whole figure into a single layer, fills it with black to create a silhouette, and uses that as a selection. With the selection active she paints on a new layer above, using a warm orange with a soft shader brush, adding light only where the lamp would actually reach: the sides of the legs, parts of the leaves, edges facing the flame. Sharper accents go in with a harder liner brush.

Because the selection constrains everything, the light lands exactly on the figure and nowhere else.

Foreground as a frame, not a decoration

The last layer goes on top: black shapes suggesting leaves and grass, Gaussian blurred so they read as out of focus. The effect she is after is that someone is peering at the creature from behind the grass.

Her constraint is explicit, and it is the whole reason foregrounds fail:

"The point is to point the viewer to this little creature, and don't overdominate the whole image with these silhouettes. So you need to be smart about it."
Alexandra Fintova, in the lesson Add Foreground from the Character Design Essentials Bundle

She tries several arrangements, judges some as too much, and ends up keeping her first attempt. Trying them all is what makes her confident the first one was right.

One final touch: a small patch of orange behind a leaf that was not popping, smudged and blurred, just enough to separate it. Then she signs the piece on its own layer and stops.

The sequence

• Six composition thumbnails, using the character as a silhouette
• Decide orientation, place the subject on a rule-of-thirds intersection
• Structure every option as background, middle, foreground
• Choose for balance, and delete the ideas that are merely nice
• Mix and blur the background, iterating on palette
• Check greyscale values after every change
• Duplicate and blur the light source, then darken everything away from it
• Paint bounced light onto the character through a silhouette selection
• Add a blurred foreground that frames without competing

Alexandra Fintova paints this entire scene, and shares the layered working file, in the Character Design Essentials Bundle on Twotap.