Industrious Illustrating #7 – Background Art

Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week, I’m sharing some background paintings I made for the UMich anime club’s visual novel (interactive choose-your-own adventure video game made up entirely of cutscenes) project about three girls piloting big robots in space and falling in love with each other along the way. But the focus of these three backgrounds is less on the girls and more on setting a scene for the drama and action unfolding in the storyline.

For this background, I wanted to make an asteroid field that looks like a somber, quiet place where two people can have a conversation in the vacuum of space. The blue-grey color palette and lonesome star illuminating the dust clouds were selected for this purpose.

For this background, I wanted to make a desolate, empty desert where the dark sky, winding sand dunes, and distant mountains create a landscape where you can have a heart-to-heart with someone you didn’t actually know very well.

And this is just a regular starry background for any conversations, fights, etc. that happen while crossing the open expanse of space.

That’s all the background art I have to share this week, but that’s not the end of this post!

As a reminder, I’m selling artwork at Con Ja Nai tomorrow, which is UMich’s one-day anime convention in the Modern Languages Building, from noon to 6 PM! There will be a bunch of other artists and vendors also selling in the building, alongside a maid cafe, panels, anime showings, and more. My booth (Table A2) will look something like this.

I hope to see you guys there! If not, I hope you’ll stick around for more Industrious Illustrating as the semester draws to a close!