Anatomy of a BG: Part 2

After many great distractions, I'm back on track with this post (to be honest, I almost posted something else before this one). Where was I?... oh yeah...

For the first batch of roughs of the cityscape, I chose the thumbnail I was most satisfied with and enlarged it to about 12-field animation paper size.

Next I used a light table to draw on top of it with a new sheet of pegged paper. This stage I'm focused on refining the shapes, correcting perspective (or faking it better), and adding details thanks to a lot of reference. On this particular spot, I had the luxury of taking my backgrounds to a finished pencil state. Sometimes because of the crunch of a schedule, I might take the roughs straight into Flash and do the refining process digitally. But I've found that my strongest designs are the ones that are totally figured out on paper first before even touching the computer (go figure).

You can view slightly larger scans of the images by clicking on them.