Well, it’s been a little while since I wrote an art tutorial – so I thought that I’d talk about a cool technique for quickly adding detail to city backgrounds with version 2.10 of a free open-source program called the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) that I found whilst preparing some of the daily art that should appear here in September.

This technique works best in cyberpunk-style sci-fi art and possibly also in retro “1980s-90s America” style artwork too. And, yes, I’ve basically made an extra piece of digital art just for this post – so, if you just want to see the full-size picture, scroll down to the very end of the article.

Begin by adding the silhouetted outlines of your buildings to the background. You can do this by setting the background colour to black (click on the bottom of the two squares on the left-hand side of the screen), then using the “free select” tool (the icon looks like a lasso on the menu in the upper-left hand corner) to draw the outline of the buildings:

Setting the background colour to black and using the free select tool (upper left-hand corner) to draw the outlines of some angular futuristic buildings.

After you’ve selected an area, click on the “Elipse select tool” beside the “free select tool” to lock in the selection. The outline of the selected area should go from a solid line to an animated/moving one (don’t ask me why, but it doesn’t seem to work if I don’t do this):

I’m not sure if this is the only way to get the selection to work properly, but it’s how I do it.

Then just hit “Delete”. Since the background colour is set to black, it will fill these areas with black. if you have a plain/solid colour background, then you can also use the “fill” tool for this too. Keep the area selected after you’ve done this.

Filling in the silhouetted buildings.

After this, select the “Paintbrush” tool from the menu in the upper-left corner. Be sure not to confuse it with the “Pencil tool” beside it (seriously, the icons look fairly similar at a glance). Once you have selected the “Paintbrush” tool, go to the menu on the right-hand side of the screen and select the brush type that looks like a giant orange ball (called “Sparks”).

Selecting the “Paintbrush” tool (upper left-hand corner) and the “Sparks” brush from the menu on the right-hand side of the screen.

After you’ve done this, look for the “Opacity” and “Size” sliders on the tool menu for the paintbrush. Although you’ll have to experiment to get the levels right for your picture (since it can depend on things like image size, distance etc…), I’d recommend setting the “Opacity” fairly low (eg: at about 20-30%) and also setting the size reasonably low (eg: I set it to “44.33” for this example) – but, again, be sure to experiment until you get the right levels for the picture you are making.

After you’ve done this, just scribble over the buildings with the brush. Sticking to using horizontal, vertical, diagonal and/or zig-zag lines tends to work best here – since it gives the buildings more of an “orderly” look than just randomly scribbling over them will:

Adding lights to the building using the “Sparks” brush.

After this, you are basically done. If you want to, you can either just finish by removing the selection (by either pressing “CTRL + SHIFT + A” or going into the “Select” menu at the top of the screen and clicking “None”) or, if you want to do more, you can invert the selection (by going into the “Select” menu at the top of the screen and clicking “Invert”) and then use the other paintbrushes and tools to add detail to the sky/distant background too. Like this:

Inverting the selection (“Select” > “Invert”) and then using the other brushes and tools to add extra background detail.

And, since this example picture seemed good enough to actually finish – here is the full-size version, with a few extra details and elements added to it. Enjoy 🙂

“Future City Bonus Artwork” by C. A. Brown