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If you’re a budding manga creator, odds are you spend most of your time working on your character artwork. That’s probably a wise choice, too, as most famous comic artists focus on drawing their stories’ leads, and hand off work on other details, such as background art, to a team of assistants.

Of course, another reality of being a budding manga artist is that you probably don’t have a publisher bankrolling your comic and paying for the abovementioned team of assistants. But thankfully there’s now a way for you to pour your efforts into story and character art and still produce something that looks polished, thanks to a new Japanese website that sells ready-to-use manga backgrounds.

Haikei Soko, or “Background Factory,” just began service on July 21. As the name implies, the website has a stockpile of backgrounds that you can purchase, download, and then augment with your own original characters, effects, and dialogue.

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As the vast majority of Japanese comics are published in black and white, the environments are devoid of color. Single backgrounds are priced at just 270 yen (US$2.20), while two-piece sets are 432 yen and three-background bundles 648 yen.

Haikei Soko’s products are grouped by location, with the largest selection of artwork being for Japanese schools.

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▼ Where else are your characters supposed to stash their love letters or eat their bento lunches?

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▼ Where else are your characters supposed to bump into each other or excrete bodily waste?

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Other categories include Home…

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…Hotel…

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…Factory…

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…Car…

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…and Nature.

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Currently, Haikei Soko has roughly 100 backgrounds available on its website here, which should be enough for you to get started on your tale of teen lovers, teen martial artists, or teen martial artists lovers right now. The company also promises to have an additional 100 backgrounds available every month, and if that’s still not enough to keep pace with your drawing, odds are you don’t really need any help in the first place.

Source: Haikei Soko
Images: Haikei Soko (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17) (edited by RocketNews24)