Community Stream Background

Are you the kind of artist who hates drawing backgrounds? Yes? Me too. Or at least I used to be. Many character artists can go their whole career without drawing a full background in a piece, and it can be a source of serious insecurity for many. I know it was for me.

I had at least some experience with drawing backgrounds over the course of my life, but until very recently, I always found it to be the most boring and difficult part of any

given piece. It was so hard to enjoy drawing something so stiff and geometric, especially when I could be drawing a character with all the movement and expression that I could possibly want with half the effort. I know I'm not alone in this problem, so let me tell you about how my attitude did a full 180 over the course of three months!

Around October of 2024, we released a YouTube short (as well as a TikTok and Instagram Reel) in which I asked the community for help suggesting decorations for our Just Chatting background on our streams. This idea actually originated 2 years prior, when I initially drew the background I was talking about. We had this idea to leave it blank and let our community add to it through Twitch redeems. This was supposed to be a way to build our community and also allow me to not have to spend several hours each day adding meaningless decorations until it was finished; I would only have to add them as requests came in. Predictably, this feature of our stream was quickly forgotten about, and we only managed to get a grand total of 2 decorations over the course of 2 years.

It wasn't until we started a complete rebrand of our stream, in which we focused on brighter colors and more comic-like layout that we decided to revisit this abandoned project of ours. This time, we had a lot more resources and skills to make it a reality. Hal had picked up the skill of editing in the time between, which meant that we could reach new audiences to participate in the suggestions, meanwhile I had been passively improving my skills over time, which meant that I was confident that I could bring any suggestion to reality. Just in case our videos completely flopped, we created a list of all sorts of references we would want to add to the background on our own, so we were never short on ideas, and the completion of the project didn't hinge on a factor we couldn't control.

Thankfully, our video did very well on YouTube, and, importantly, it reached the right audience. Within just one day, our notifications were flooded with all kinds of suggestions from games and shows, some of which we had never heard of, others we were more than familiar with. Going into this project I was sure that it would become tiring relatively quickly, but after getting all of these suggestions, I had become excited to get to work on it. This has never happened to me before; being excited to draw a background? Who even was I?

I suspect there were three main factors that contributed to this change of heart. First, getting our community involved in this artwork made it feel special and fun. People we didn't know at all were making suggestions and even subscribing to our YouTube channel because they were genuinely interested in what we were doing. It was more than a little bit encouraging. Second, getting ideas from our community meant that I wasn't being challenged creatively as much in the process of creating the background. A huge amount of pressure when it comes to drawing in general is all of the decision-making, and that problem is exacerbated when you're drawing something you're not as familiar with. In this way, I could add more and more decorations without having to think about it at all. Of course, I still had to think about where I would put each item and how it would be arranged with every other, but that was a form of decision-making that came much more naturally to me, and the longer I worked on the background, the easier it became. Third and finally, I was able to work at a slow and steady pace. I wanted to fully finish drawing one item at a time. That way, I could update the background that appears on stream slowly over time, I could make follow-up videos in which I focus on each individual suggestion, and I could keep up with newer suggestions as they came in. As a result, I could see that background grow and grow over time without having to stress as much about how it was unfinished. This all made the process a lot more enjoyable because it was so much easier to visualize progress.

I ended up falling into a rhythm where I would stream myself drawing the background once a week, and I would add seven items in each stream, that way, we would have enough videos to post during that whole week, all the while, we would be getting even more suggestions. It was certainly a lot of work, and many of our streams lasted more than 5 hours, but it was manageable and most importantly, enjoyable. As everything started coming together, I became more confident in my ability as I got a sense of how to make it feel dynamic and alive in the same way I would a character. I took care to add levels to the background, making sure to stack things on top of each other and overlap whenever I could, which made it all look even more cluttered while being interesting to look at without being overwhelming. As time went on, I became more ambitious and it didn't take long for me to start animating things. I used both frame-by-frame animation and keyframing depending on what I was doing, but however I went about it, that subtle movement did wonders to make the whole thing feel more alive and connected.

That problem I had before, about how backgrounds are boing because they're stiff and geometric felt like it was completely gone. Over the course of just a few months, I had figured out how to use composition, movement and detail to add life to a piece of scenery in a way that I couldn't before.

At the same time I was working on my stream background, I was also working on the thumbnails for the first few episodes of our Cult of the Lamb videos on YouTube. On Tuesdays, I was working on the background, and on Thursdays, I was working on thumbnails. I decided to take the opportunity to start flexing my background muscles, since I was already working on getting better, and I wasn't going to see much improvement by drawing the same thing for 3 months, and what I ended up finding was that backgrounds felt so much more approachable and fun than they did before. It helped that I had references from the game to help me with the details. The only thing I had to make choices for was the framing and it was through this approach that I learned the true power of adding backgrounds to artwork: they help emphasize the composition. This is especially useful with YouTube thumbnails, because you want to convey as much information as possible in one image without overwhelming the eye, so you have to draw the viewers attention to the most important parts. I was able to accomplish this by utilizing the background to guide the eye. It was a strategy that I had been aware of for a long time, but I hadn't properly cracked how apply it to my art in any meaningful way until I did this. I was using this strategy in much smaller ways as I was arranging the decorations in my chatting background, and doing that gave me the skills I needed to create really cohesive pieces with the action and the background complimenting each other really beautifully.

I am now at a point where I don't even want to draw something without a background. I find that it helps me immensely with adding purpose to a character's pose or action to connect it to the background somehow. It has made art infinitely more fun, like I've unlocked a whole new level and broken through the ceiling that was blocking my improvement.

If you are someone who has trouble with backgrounds like I did, I recommend taking the creative pressure off of yourself by using a background from a show you like as a reference and directly copying the details from it. You'd be surprised how fun a study like that can be; it can help you notice little details you might not have otherwise. Additionally, I would start by drawing a background devoid of characters. Challenge yourself to see how much energy and movement you can create just from furniture and decorations. You'll get a much deeper understanding of how you can utilize composition if you limit yourself in this way. After you do this at least once, then you can start playing with combining both backgrounds and characters. You have enough foundational skills at this point to be able to trust your intuition when you're doing a piece like this, even it it feels like you might be breaking the rules you've learned. Sometimes logic and vanishing points can be broken to get a better composition.

In my experience, art becomes more fun the more you are capable of, so keep improving until there is nothing you can't do!

Want to watch a video where me and Hal go more in depth about this improvement?