Background art

[Blondbraid]

* Cassiebsg looks confused

what umbrella stand?

Well, technically it's a wicker basket serving as an umbrella stand, tough not exclusively for umbrellas.

Anyway, after the feedback here I've decided to make the backgrounds in the style of the first one for now, but I did experiment a bit with darker lines.
Here is another background that I spent the last weeks working on, and it'd be nice to hear if you have any thoughts or opinions on it.

And here with darker lines on the walls:

(the background outside the door and window still isn't finished in case you are wondering)

[Grundislav]

First one looks better, mainly because the second one is inconsistent. It looks jarring to have the black outlines only on the edges of the wall logs and not anything else. If you're going to do that, I suggest making all the outlines black.

[Blondbraid]

First one looks better, mainly because the second one is inconsistent. It looks jarring to have the black outlines only on the edges of the wall logs and not anything else. If you're going to do that, I suggest making all the outlines black.

You are right, Here is an updated version where I also added a character for comparison, which one of these looks best?

[Chicky]

Hey BlondBraid, as I've said before I really like the way you paint these backgrounds, personally I think you should stop adding such drastic things after painting (filters or cell outlines) and work on tweaking what you already have, they look really good as they are!

Part of the problem you're having with fitting the characters in could be due to the lack of contrast, a lot of your image sits in the middle of the greyscale, which makes it feel a little more washed out and less 'contrast-y'. The characters however have 100% black for the outlines and fill colours that are very close to white, you want to try and create this contrast in your backgrounds too.

In the edit below I've tried to keep the main focus point in the vertical centre of the image as this will be where the character can walk. Your characters both have dark outlines and sharp pixels, so they feel like they are 'in focus' if looking through a camera, try to match this with the walkable areas and it will help the character blend in. Your background was mostly in focus, so it was easy for me to create depth super quick by making the foreground sacks blurry and darkening them, as if they were further away from the door/window's light source. I also tried to soften the contrast of the back wall a little and add some contrast to the tops of the middleground sacks. I dropped the focus of them slightly too (added blur) so they appear to sit behind the character better.

I might have gone overkill but it was a pleasure to play around with your awesome background

[Blondbraid]

Thanks for the tips, your tweaks look really nice and I might try something similar with the focus and contrast.
I'm happy to hear that you liked the background!

[Cassiebsg]

* Cassiebsg likes

(But to be on topic)
1st reminds me more of a cartoon stile, second a comic.
If I'd have to choose, I would go with Chicky's 1st paint over, really nice in deepth perception (and what my brain also told me it should look like), it almost make me think it's a 3D painting!