There are a lot of ways to integrate your figures convincingly with your backgrounds–I’m going to detail what I believe is the easiest one here. It’s easy because from the early stages, you’re thinking about the composition as a whole, rather than seeing the background and the figures as separate entities. If you think about the background as being as important as the figures, rather than something boring and incidental which you’ve got to add, you’re on the right track already.
Step One
Take a great big brush and block in the main colours you want to use. Pay attention to lighting: if you don’t get it right now, it won’t fall into place later. You can be quite general about it, but make sure you’ve got the direction and source of the light firmly in your head. In this case, the figures, a pair of lazy rats, are backlit with warm yellow and orange. The light is coming from behind and very slightly to the left.
Step Two
Add the major shadows. Use the shadows to draw the eye through the picture. Here, I’ve got branches of a tree cradling and framing the rats. I put some of the shadows from the tree onto the rats’ undersides to begin to block in their shadowed areas. (A little trick for digital painters: Do the shadows on a separate layer. Then, you can erase into them with the Eraser tool to add cheap and easy highlights. When you’re done erasing, you can flatten that layer down to avoid using too much memory.)
Step Three
Start giving the extreme background some character–add textures, refine the lighting a bit, et cetera. Always paint forward from background to foreground.
Step Four
Here, I’m roughing in the middleground a bit, adding some shapes to the tree to suggest bark, and some vibrant colour near the rats to draw attention to that area of the painting. Although the eye should be led naturally around the entire canvas in a good composition, it’s important to attract most of the viewer’s attention to the focal point. I’ve already started to do this in several ways:
1. Composition: Lines and curves leading towards the rats (the branches of the tree).
2. Colour: Extra colour near the rats.
3. Values: The most intense light is right behind the rats’ heads, so the most intense contrasts will be on the rats and the area immediately surrounding them.
4. Perspective: When I was drawing the sketch, I made sure the rats were viewed from the same angle as the tree branch. If the perspective on the figures doesn’t match the background perspective, no matter what else you do, your picture won’t look quite right.
