13 More Art Masters Every Artist Should Study — Known for Their Immersive Worldbuilding, Landscapes, and Background Design

You can draw a great character. You've put in the hours on anatomy, on faces, on poses.

But the moment you try to place them somewhere; the world falls apart.

The background looks flat. The environment feels borrowed. The scene has no air in it, no soul, no sense that anything has ever happened there before your character showed up.

If that hits close to home, you're not failing. You're just missing the right teachers. 🙏

In our original article, we covered 13 Art Masters Every Artist Should Study and the core techniques they each unlock. Artists loved it.

But the requests kept coming for something more specific:

"Who do I study for landscapes?" "Where do I look to learn background design?" "Which masters actually built entire worlds with their art?"

This is that article.

These are 13 more art masters focused specifically on immersive environments, atmospheric landscapes, and background design that feels like a living, breathing place. Each one carries a single lesson that will change how you see, and how you draw, the world around your characters.

Let's get into it. 🔥

Why Studying Landscape and Environment Masters Hits Different

Most artists study figure masters. That makes sense. Characters are where the attention goes.

But here's what nobody talks about enough: the background is where your world lives. It's the context that makes a character feel real, grounded, and emotionally resonant.

When you look at a Miyazaki film and feel that ache of wanting to be somewhere, that's not an accident. It's craft. Specifically, it's environment craft, built by artists who dedicated their entire careers to understanding how light, space, texture, and scale communicate feeling.

The masters in this list are your shortcut into that world.

Study them the same way you'd study any master: don't copy their style. Extract their decisions. Ask not "how did they draw this?" but "why did they make this choice, and what does it accomplish?"

That question alone will transform your practice.

The 13 Art Masters Every Artist Should Study for Landscapes, Worldbuilding, and Background Design

1. Eyvind Earle — The Master of Stylized Depth 🌲

If you've ever seen Sleeping Beauty (1959) and felt like the forest itself was a character, that was Eyvind Earle.

Earle was the lead stylist on the film and essentially invented a visual language for it from scratch. His backgrounds fused Gothic architecture, medieval tapestry, and Japanese woodblock printing into something completely original.

What he teaches: How to create depth and atmospheric immersion using stylization instead of realism.

Most beginners think depth requires realistic rendering. Earle proves it doesn't. His trees are flat shapes, but they recede. His skies are graphic patterns, but they feel vast.

How to apply this:

• Design your background using shape language before adding any rendering

• Let geometric repetition create depth instead of blurring

• Choose one artistic tradition (Japanese, medieval, Art Nouveau) and let it inform your environment's logic

Earle's lesson is liberating: you don't have to paint realistically to create a world that feels real.

2. Albert Bierstadt — Emotion at Geological Scale 🏔️

Bierstadt painted the American West in the 1800s and made it look like a dream someone was having about God.

His landscapes are enormous in scale, luminous in light, and almost aggressively emotional. Mountains glow. Rivers carry light. Storm clouds feel like living things with intentions.

What he teaches: How to use scale contrast and atmospheric light to create awe.

The gap between the tiny human figures and the massive environment in his paintings isn't just compositional. It's philosophical. It makes you feel small in the way that standing at the edge of a canyon makes you feel small.

How to apply this:

• Practice "scale anchoring": include a tiny recognizable element (a tree, a figure, a cabin) against a massive environment

• Push your light sources further than feels comfortable; Bierstadt's sunsets are borderline unbelievable, and that's exactly the point

• Study how he layers fog and haze to create atmospheric depth between mountain ranges

If your landscapes feel small even when they're meant to be vast, Bierstadt is your teacher.

3. Kazuo Oga — The Soul of Studio Ghibli's Worlds 🍃

You know those impossibly lush, textured, breathing countryside backgrounds in My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away?

Most of them came from one person: Kazuo Oga.

He is, without exaggeration, one of the greatest background painters in the history of animation. His environments don't feel designed. They feel remembered, like places you've actually been to in a dream.

What he teaches: How to paint environments that carry emotional memory.

Oga's technique involves layering texture and color in a way that mimics how memory works: slightly soft around the edges, hyper-detailed in the specific places your eye lands, rich with the smell and temperature of a season.

How to apply this:

• Paint your backgrounds with a specific season and time of day in mind before choosing colors

• Add micro-details (mossy stones, bent grass, worn wood) that nobody asked for but everyone notices

• Study how he varies edge quality: hard edges for close elements, impossibly soft edges for sky and distance

Studying Oga will make you feel the weight of a summer afternoon in every background you paint. That's the goal.

4. John Howe — Worldbuilding as Architecture 🏰

John Howe is one of the conceptual artists most responsible for the visual language of Middle-earth as we know it from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. He has spent decades painting Tolkien's world across every medium imaginable.

But his skill isn't just rendering. It's architectural imagination.

What he teaches: How to make a world feel like it has a history before the story starts.

Howe's environments feel ancient. Not because they're detailed, but because every structure, every ruin, every landscape feature suggests centuries of decisions made by real (fictional) civilizations.

How to apply this:

• When designing an environment, ask: "Who built this, and why? What's been lost since then?"

• Add signs of time: erosion, growth, rebuilding, abandonment

• Research real historical architecture and geology; Howe's fantasy is always grounded in the real world

Howe is essential for anyone working in fantasy environments, worldbuilding for games, or concept art for animation and film.

5. Claude Monet — How to Paint Feeling, Not Things 🌸

Monet didn't paint haystacks. He painted the light on haystacks at 4pm in October.

That distinction is everything.

His Impressionist approach to landscape taught the world that environments don't have to be photographically accurate to be emotionally true. In fact, capturing the feeling of a place often means being less precise, not more.

What he teaches: How to prioritize mood over accuracy in environment painting.

How to apply this:

• Before painting an environment, write one word that describes how it should feel (lonely, golden, electric, still)

• Let that word guide every color and value decision

• Practice painting the same scene at three different times of day; Monet's series paintings are the single greatest lesson in how light changes mood

Monet's lesson is especially powerful for digital artists who over-render everything. Sometimes the feeling is in the blur, not the detail.

6. Roger Dean — Impossible Worlds That Feel Inevitable 🌀

If you've ever seen a Yes album cover from the 1970s, you've seen Roger Dean's work.

His fantasy landscapes feature floating islands, bioluminescent rock formations, alien plant life, and organic architecture that shouldn't exist but somehow feels completely logical once you're looking at it.

What he teaches: How to design original environments with internal visual consistency.

Dean's worlds work because he builds them with rules. The organic shapes repeat. The color palette stays coherent. The architecture fits the terrain. Even when nothing is realistic, everything is consistent.

How to apply this:

• Define 3 visual rules for your environment before drawing it (example: everything curves, the light source is always green, structures grow from the ground rather than sitting on it)

• Repeat your signature shapes the way nature repeats patterns

• Design your palette around one dominant hue with two accent colors maximum

Roger Dean is essential for sci-fi and fantasy concept artists who want to build worlds that feel original, not borrowed.

7. Hiroshi Yoshida — Atmosphere as the Subject 🌊

Hiroshi Yoshida was a Japanese woodblock printmaker working in the early 20th century. He traveled the world and translated what he saw into images that feel like silence made visible.

His landscapes of mountains, harbors, and temples are studies in atmosphere. Fog, rain, moonlight, snow. He wasn't painting the mountain. He was painting what it feels like to stand in front of the mountain.

What he teaches: How to use limited color and strong silhouettes to create atmosphere.

How to apply this:

• Practice printing or painting with a strict palette of 4 colors maximum; limitation forces atmospheric decision-making

• Study how he uses flat shapes with subtle texture to suggest complex surfaces

• Try creating a scene where the weather is the true subject, not the object

Yoshida's work is a masterclass in restraint. The less he shows, the more you feel.

8. Syd Mead — The Future as a Lived Environment 🚀

Syd Mead was a visual futurist who designed environments for Blade Runner, TRON, and Aliens, among dozens of other landmark projects.

What separated him from other sci-fi designers was that his worlds always felt inhabited. His cities had grime. His spaceships had maintenance hatches. His futures had lunch breaks and traffic jams.

What he teaches: How to ground speculative environments in human-scale details.

The reason Blade Runner's Los Angeles feels real is because Mead designed it the way a city planner and a sociologist would, not the way a fantasy artist would. The technology evolved from need. The environment reflects culture.

How to apply this:

• When designing a sci-fi or future environment, start with the people who live there; what do they eat, what do they fear, what do they do for fun?

• Add "maintenance details": worn surfaces, repaired systems, signs of daily use

• Think about economic inequality in your world; great sci-fi environments always show who has power and who doesn't

Syd Mead's lesson is one of the most important in all of concept art: a world is only as convincing as the life being lived inside it.

9. John Constable — Truth in the Ordinary Landscape 🌾

At a time when landscape painting was considered less prestigious than historical painting, Constable said something radical with his art: an ordinary English field is worth painting.

He was right. His skies alone changed the history of European art.

What he teaches: How to find compositional and emotional power in ordinary environments.

Most aspiring artists chase the dramatic: dragons, ruins, apocalypse. Constable's lesson is that a hay wagon crossing a stream can hit just as hard if you know how to see it.

How to apply this:

• Practice drawing or painting somewhere unremarkable near you: your street, your backyard, a parking lot

• Focus entirely on the light and how it falls, not on "making it interesting"

• Study Constable's sketches specifically, not just his finished works; his process reveals the decisions

This practice will make your dramatic environments better because you'll understand the ordinary that gives the dramatic its contrast.

10. Makoto Shinkai — The Longing in the Light ✨

If you've seen Your Name, Weathering with You, or 5 Centimeters Per Second, you know this feeling: a single image of an empty train platform or a sunlit street can make you ache with a nostalgia for a place you've never been.

That is Makoto Shinkai's superpower.

What he teaches: How to use light, color, and environmental detail to create emotional longing.

Shinkai's backgrounds are painted with hyperreal precision, but the feeling they create is deeply personal. Every environment feels like it misses someone. The light is always almost too beautiful, which is exactly how we remember places we love.

How to apply this:

• Study the concept of mono no aware (the bittersweet awareness of impermanence) and let it guide your lighting choices

• Use lens effects: light flares, bloom, soft gradients in highlights to make environments feel like memories

• Layer your environments: a busy, detailed background with a character in silhouette creates emotional distance that aches

Shinkai is required study for any artist working in anime aesthetics, visual storytelling, or emotional concept art.

11. Alan Lee — Pencil, Myth, and the Memory of Landscape 🌿

Alan Lee is the other half of the artistic duo (alongside John Howe) who defined the visual language of Tolkien's world. But where Howe builds with architecture, Lee conjures with atmosphere.

His pencil drawings of Middle-earth feel like they were excavated from a forgotten history rather than invented by a person.

What he teaches: How to suggest a vast, ancient world with minimal marks.

Lee's pencil work is extraordinarily economical. He knows what to leave out. His forests suggest themselves. His ruins imply civilizations. The viewer's imagination is invited in as a collaborator.

How to apply this:

• Practice drawing environments in pencil with a deliberate attempt to suggest, not show: let the viewer complete the details

• Study how he uses light pencil hatching for atmospheric fog and heavy lines for close foreground detail

• Before any environment drawing, ask: "What am I NOT drawing? And does leaving it out make it more powerful?"

Alan Lee teaches one of the hardest lessons for ambitious young artists: restraint is a superpower.

12. Thomas Moran — Color as Emotional Argument 🌋

Thomas Moran painted the American West alongside Bierstadt, but his approach was more radical. He used color the way a poet uses metaphor: not to describe, but to argue.

His paintings of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon were so powerful that they reportedly influenced Congress to create the National Parks system. That is environmental art as advocacy.

What he teaches: How to use color temperature contrast to create emotional urgency in landscapes.

How to apply this:

• Study how Moran uses warm (orange, gold) against cool (blue, violet) to create tension in the same scene

• Practice painting a landscape with one color temperature for the sky and the opposite for the ground

• Push your saturation further than feels realistic in the focal areas of your composition

If your environment paintings feel emotionally neutral, Moran will teach you how to give them an opinion.

13. Yoshitoshi Abe — The Emotion Hidden Inside the Environment 🌙

Yoshitoshi Abe (Haibane Renmei, Serial Experiments Lain, NieR: Automata) works in the space where design, philosophy, and emotion blur together. His environments aren't just settings.

They are psychological states made visible.

What he teaches: How to use environment design to externalize a character's inner world.

A crumbling city. A dream space that shouldn't be peaceful but is. A hallway that feels like it's watching you. Abe builds environments that carry the emotional weight of the character inhabiting them.

How to apply this:

• Before designing an environment for a character, write down three emotional states the character carries; let those states become the environment

• Use architectural symbolism: high ceilings for loneliness, narrow corridors for anxiety, open fields for grief

• Study how Abe uses desaturation and soft light to create an atmosphere of quiet melancholy without ever being explicit about it

Abe is essential for animators, game artists, and concept artists who want their worlds to do emotional work alongside their characters.

How to Study These Masters Without Getting Lost 🎯

Here's the framework that actually works. Same one we shared in part one, because it's still true: Don't study styles. Study decisions.

For each master on this list, spend one week focused on their specific lesson. Just one. Do studies from their work, then apply the principle to an original piece.

After 13 weeks, you'll have touched every lesson here once. After a year of rotating through them, you'll have absorbed something permanent.

A simple weekly rhythm:

• Day 1-2: Study 5 to 10 works by the master. Take notes on their choices.

• Day 3: Do one direct study (copy a piece to understand the decisions)

• Day 4-5: Create one original piece applying just their core lesson

• Day 6-7: Share it. Get feedback. Rest.

That last step is the one most self-taught artists skip. And it might be the most important one.

Put Your Environment Art to the Test 🏆

Speaking of sharing your work: Anitoku.com runs Monthly Art Contests where artists can win up to $100 and get their art featured on the Anitoku homepage for the whole community to see.

Imagine spending a week studying Kazuo Oga's backgrounds or pushing a landscape in the style of Thomas Moran's color theory and then submitting that piece to a real contest with real prizes and real eyes on it.

That's not just practice. That's a full creative cycle: learn, apply, create, share, grow.

You can visit the Art Contest page on Anitoku to see previous winners and get a sense of what the community is creating. The work there is evidence that artists at every level are participating, improving, and being celebrated.

If your background and environment art has been living in a folder nobody has seen, it deserves better than that. 🌟

Frequently Asked Questions About Studying Master Artists

Who are the best artists to study for landscape painting?

For pure atmospheric landscape power, start with Albert Bierstadt, Claude Monet, and Thomas Moran. For more stylized or animation-influenced landscape study, Kazuo Oga and Eyvind Earle are essential. Each teaches a different aspect of how environments communicate emotion.

How do I study master artists without just copying them?

Focus on intent, not output. When you do a study of a master's work, write down three decisions they made (composition, light placement, color temperature, edge quality) and then apply those same three decisions to an original piece of your own. The copy teaches your hand. The original piece teaches your brain.

Can studying old masters help me with digital and anime art?

Absolutely. The fundamentals of light, atmosphere, composition, and color are the same whether you're using oil paint or a Procreate brush. Artists like Makoto Shinkai and Yoshitoshi Abe openly draw from classical painting traditions while making work that's unmistakably contemporary. The masters inform the future.

How long should I spend studying each master?

One focused week per master is enough to extract their primary lesson. If something resonates deeply, spend another week. The goal isn't to become fluent in their style. It's to borrow one principle, internalize it through practice, and carry it forward into your own work.

What's the best way to find high-quality reference work from these artists?

Museum digital archives (The Met, The Smithsonian, Google Arts and Culture) are free and high-resolution for classical painters. For animation artists like Kazuo Oga, the published art books (particularly The Art of Studio Ghibli series) are irreplaceable. For concept artists like Syd Mead and John Howe, look for their individual published collections.

A Final Word: Your World Is Worth Building 🌏

Here's what every artist on this list has in common.

They weren't satisfied with pretty. They wanted real. They wanted places that breathe, skies that mean something, backgrounds that carry the emotional weight of everyone who has ever stood inside them.

That's what you're chasing when you struggle with backgrounds. You're not chasing technical skill. You're chasing the ability to make a viewer feel like they've been somewhere.

And that skill is learnable. These 13 masters prove it.

Study them. One at a time. With purpose. Apply what you learn. Finish something. Share it.

And when you have a piece you're proud of, bring it to Anitoku.com. The community there is built for artists who take their craft seriously and want to grow alongside people who get it.

The monthly art contest is waiting. The community is ready. And the world inside your head deserves to be seen. 💪

Now close the tab, open your sketchbook, and go build something. 🎨

Want to study the foundations before diving into environment masters?

Read the original article: 13 Art Masters Every Artist Should Study (And the One Technique Each Teaches Best) on Anitoku.com.

And don't forget to check the Art Contest page to see previous winners and enter your work.