 Hi! I'm Sunako, a freelance artist. I often like to use photos for my art and I think it's a nice way to get into drawing your characters in more realistic scenes and lighting, so I thought I would make a video to explain my process for doing this. To keep it simple, I'll focus on using just one photo as a base. The first thing you need for this is the photo, or the idea for the photo. I recommend taking the photo yourself. It can be a good excuse for going out. Most smartphone cameras are totally good enough for this. If you can't take the photo yourself, you should use a copyright free photo that you can find from a site like Pixabay or Unsplash. Try to keep in mind the character's position when you take these pictures. Imagine where the character would be when you take a photo. Personally, I like to think that a ghost is posing for me and I'm taking pictures of them. This is helpful for getting pics that work well as character art backgrounds. Also, rather than taking pictures that are too bright, take some that are too dark in case you can't get the perfect exposure. If they're too bright, you might lose a lot of information from the picture. So when you have your picture ready, you can do a few things before continuing, such as straightening it, fixing distortion, rotation or brightness. You can do this in any art program. I would advise against doing any drastic color filters or adjustments yet, because I find it easier to paint my character with the same type of lighting if the picture is not heavily edited. You might also need to run the photo through some upscaling or downscaling if it's too different from your preferred canvas size. Generally, upscaling is not good to do, but if you have to, I personally don't mind doing it a little bit, because I will paint over a lot of parts anyway. Next, I usually run the photo through a stylized filter, unless I'm planning to paint over all of it completely. For this purpose, Photoshop has quite a lot of filters, but for this artwork, I used a free program called Photosketcher, which is also very good for this. It's quite slow to process, but it's got a lot of different filters and many adjustments for each of them. I ended up using the third one under the painting category, with some slight adjustments to the default settings. Now, I let the speed paint of this artwork run while I explain the rest, so I made a new canvas in Clip Studio Paint in A3 paper 300 pixels per inch size, which is how I usually work, because I want to be able to make prints of my art. In pixels, it's about 5000 wide and 3500 tall. You don't have to use such a large size if you don't want or need it. My photo that I took with my phone was a bit too small in size, so I had to upscale it a bit. When placing your character, don't just place it anywhere, but keep in mind the basic composition rules. Try to get the character's face in the spot where it would look the best to have a focal point. In this case, I just thought about the rule of thirds and how the lines of the window frames and perspective are guiding your eyes towards that corner where the chair is. Sometimes you might have to crop the photo quite a lot or zoom into it a lot to get a nice composition. In some cases, such as this, I actually opt to extend the picture by painting in the missing bits. Usually, if it's just missing a bit like this from the edges, you can pretty easily figure out what should be there and paint it in, or even use Photoshop's content aware fill. An extra thing you can do to help with drawing the character that you can do for any art is take a photo of yourself in the right pose and angle, even better if you can have the same direction of sunlight. Sometimes I just take a few quick selfies in the background photo location. The best would be if you could pose wherever your background photo was taken so you'd have one version with no person in it and another one with a person in it. But most of the time this is not feasible so I just take post-reference pics at my room at home. You can do this by putting your phone or camera on a tripod and using a bluetooth shutter. And if you take screenshots from a video, you don't even need a bluetooth shutter. A tripod with a ball head so you can angle it and the basic phone clamp to hold your phone is all you really need. Or a regular tripod with a fancier phone clamp that can be turned and angled. But all this is just extra, you don't really need to do this unless you want to. So the amount of painting over the photo that you want to do depends really on what you prefer. You don't have to do it at all if you don't want to or you could just paint over some of the foreground. If I'm not painting over everything I like to paint over things that I feel like look too much like a photo still. But my main objective with the paint over is controlling the amount of details. Such as here the first thing I do is get the painting over the windows because there's an insane amount of detail here in the trees outside. It felt like too much like it's taking away attention from the character. But I bring back some of the detail later because I still want to keep the lush feel of the greenery and because the strong texture of the trees outside creates contrast to the mostly smooth textures on the inside. Use your own intuition to balance the background in this way. A good thing to remember is that generally things that are further away should have less detail than things that are close up and things in the shadow and dark areas can have less detail than areas in the sunlight. The most detail is visible in areas of sunlight that are close to you or the focal point. While you're working always keep in mind your focal point, which is usually the character's face, and think about how you could bring more attention to it. Or in reverse, remove attention from other areas. Some examples are contrasting values, warm versus cool colors and contrast in detail, texture or sharpness of edges. This is a really broad topic that could use its own video to be honest and I'm sure many of them exist already. You can also move, remove or add things to your photo. It's much easier to add things than to remove or move them though. I added an extra hanging plant in place of what was there on the wall before and I was also considering moving the tomato plant behind the character because composition-wise it's not in a very good place, unfortunately I got a bit lazy. If you move or remove something, you'll have to paint in what was there underneath it and this can be a hassle if the section underneath it is complex like the corner section of these window frames. I also decided to paint over the potted plants on the table to make the shapes more clear and balanced. If I was really putting in maximum effort, I would also draw some outlines for the leaves and detail them a bit more instead of these blobs of color. In this paintover stage is where you can really make the most difference in the artistic sense. A filtered photo is in the end just a filtered photo. The filter doesn't know what to emphasize or simplify or how to make it the most visually pleasing. We can take some liberties to simplify and emphasize shapes, to make things more appealing. When you paint in your character, you should try your best to use the same lighting as the photo has. It's really useful to know realistic light and color theory for this step. A book that I would highly recommend is Color and Light by James Gurney. That book has it all and for me it was invaluable. The videos of Marco Bucci are also very good. If you understand the theory for each lighting scenario, you'll be able to know how to color your character well. In this photo the afternoon sun, which is the main light, is coming into the room at an angle. The walls and roof of the room are creamy white and the floor is red. The sunlight bouncing around this room would then create a warm ambient light for this scene. And the sunlight is a warm type of light to begin with. The sky is also mostly clear so I can add a dash of blue in the planes that face upwards since she is sitting next to the window. Those upwards facing planes would have a direct line of sight to the sky when you think about it. In this way you can analyze the photo and then color your character in a way that fits and looks like they're actually in there and not like they have been pasted in from somewhere else. This is why I would really recommend that book which has all the info on almost every type of lighting that you might encounter, including artificial lights. I'm still not the best or fastest when it comes to the character art and I usually make many revisions throughout but I like to think that I get there in the end. Honestly my brain going on autopilot and having these preconceived notions of what anime art should look like are my worst stumbling blocks. Stick to the fundamental theory and you'll do good and don't forget to zoom out and check the overall balance every now and then. Remember to add shadow and ambient occlusion under your character and also keep in mind any structures that would obstruct the light that is hitting your character in the case of sunlight especially. Here I almost forgot about the window frame as you might have noticed so in this way keep going until you're satisfied with the look and balance of your artwork. Towards the end I add any effects such as extra glow or extra light rays, blur, sharpening, additional contrast or lowering contrast etc. You can do this in any program but I prefer to go to Photoshop for my post-processing. This last step is very up to your personal preferences and I can't really tell you how to do your post-processing exactly and this is where I'd add any overall filters to the color as well. In this case I didn't edit it that noticeably but it did become a bit warmer and brighter. At an earlier point I did also blur the outside of the windows just a little bit and then we are done. I hope this video was helpful. Please leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback. If you'd like to support me on making more artwork and YouTube content, check out my Patreon. I upload speedpaints and the files of almost all my drawings as I make them. Thank you very much for watching and have a great day!