I Tried Making Webtoon Backgrounds with Midjourney, and It Actually Works
I draw as a hobby, but I'm really bad at backgrounds, so I gave AI a try.
When I gave it a specific prompt like 'Joseon-era hanok village in dawn mist,' the quality went way up. At first I only used 'hanok' and it came out like crap lol
It still needs a bit of manual work, but it's plenty usable for rough sketches. I get why artists are all using it these days.
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Agreed, backgrounds are a real prompt battle lol. If you just put "hanok," it just gives you a Chinese restaurant.
I also do assistant work for webtoons, and I generate background roughs with Midjourney and only do the inking myself. One tip: time-of-day + weather keywords like 'dawn fog' are really important—without them, the lighting comes out all flat, which makes it harder to fix later. Also, if you set the canvas ratio first with --ar before generating, the composition won't break when you crop, so it's easier. The hands-on work is unavoidable, but at the rough sketch stage it really feels like it cuts the time in half.
Well, that’s a bit… These days, readers can all tell when a background looks AI-generated. Especially with subject matter where structure matters, like hanok, the number of columns and the roof curves get all warped, so if you use it as-is, you’ll get criticized. Even if it’s just for a rough underlay, someone still has to redraw everything anyway, so saying it’s “good enough to use” feels like an overstatement. There are also copyright and commercial-use issues. From the article alone, it sounds like good prompts solve everything, but in practice it’s case by case.