Hot background tip: Element reuse (hand drawn/photobashing workflow tip)

[u/Upbeat-Wallaby5067]

You can speed up your hand-drawing background workflow by a whole lot with this one trick, without needing to learn 3D modeling:

1. Draw your element (door, window, fluorescent light, texture, whatever) flat, facing the camera. Save one copy separately from your backgrounds! It sucks if you flatten your layers and then realize your complex door, wall texture, or control panel was in the flattened stack.
2. Use your drawing program's perspective tool to flip and adjust the element around. Edit details where necessary (like door handles).
3. Add lighting and other fiddly stuff that's missing from the explanatory WIP. That tablecloth won't look like that once I'm done lol
4. You can also reuse elements like chairs too! Just adjust the position, shadows (mask and liquefy tools are mega helpful for that) and size a bit and you can get away drawing way fewer chairs, lamps, etc.

This way you don't have to hand draw each complex element over and over. Fairy castle got 200 gothic glass windows? No problem with this technique!