New Background \ New Game \ New Style

[..]

Hey

Been more than a while since i've been active here but I've gotten the 'adventure bug' again.

I've been experimenting with ideas for a game and here's a background I've put together :



Sorry for the large image.

It's a combination of a photo-collaging technique and some photoshop work to try and get that hand-drawn Broken-Sword-esque style of art.

Mainly looking for critique on the style and tone rather than the actual background itself, unless there are any gaping errors.

[bog]

this looks pretty cool to me except the sky and the plants over the water. how are you going to make the characters?

[..]

What's wrong with the sky and the plants bog?

I'll probably either use a similar technique with real people for the characters, or find somebody who actually knows what they're doing for that !

[rbaleksandar]

Hi
 I love it. This mixture looks great but some critic below...
 Shadows are fine as far as I see since this is from a photo and on a photo you can't get the shadows wrong I don't understand why's the street on and around the crossing in such color - dark grey to black and somehow wet. The houses are cool (look a little bit like in BS-style), but the road doesn't look good at all (well, it looks nice, but not in BS-style). All in all doesn't look like the style used in BS. Here you have some smeared tones and shapes and in BS you can see every single detail. Try to "sharpen" it more so that you achieve this. Sky is too pale. Plants near the water look more like seaweed than reed (or whatever is supposed to grow there ). This is because of the smearing of colors you've made.


PS: But I really can't imagine what kind of a character will look nice on such background since it's a mixture of styles.



EDIT: Take a look at this:

Yes, some things are smeared but you can still clearly see what is it in detail.

[..]

Cheers for the tips.

Slightly edited version in original post now.  I see what you mean about the road,  the whole image is made up of so many photos it's hard to get the individual bits to match up so I've tried to give it a more even tone. Also made the sky a bit brighter

I'm not trying to emulate broken sword exactly though, i just want that sort of 'realism' over the cartoony styles of CMI.

[bog]

sorry for not being more specific,

the sky looks too fuzzy, i think it would look better if you use some kind of painted or drawn sky...kinda like this:



Those plants(i don't know what they're called in english) over the water have a pretty thick dark outline on their tops, probably from some effect you used and it looks kinda bad to me.

[rbaleksandar]

The new edit - you definetly added some detail-feel BUT:
1.The top of grass (whatever) by the river looks bad. Not only too smeared but also it looks kind of in relief to me.
2.You've ruined the shadows. The most obvious example is the shadow thrown by the lamp on the top right side of the door of the house on the left (too many "of"-s ). The white wall looks with more detail but looks worse than before. The house on the right (the brown one) looks nice in all but reminds more of oils on a parchemnt then the BS-style. Better return the previous version and work only on the road (which looks much much better in the second version omho so you can copy it from there), the sky (like bog's edit but still doesn't fit the rest of the image) and the plants by the river(s of Babylon ).

PS: Take a look at this here and you'll notice what's wrong:

[Jakerpot]

for me is a nice background, just the black outlines confuse it a little.

[rbaleksandar]

Jakerpot, have you played BS?

btw Jordan, will this be the resolution of your game? Because if you make it smaller like bog did, it'll look better.

[Moresco]

You could sure go in and start detailing everything a lot.  It looks washed out and bleh to me.  Smashing different photo elements together is a neat technique if you do it right, it takes an understanding of line perspective, shading and value perspective, color perspective, and then you can work at meshing everything together.  It's a lot of work, you can't cheat everything just by cutting out some nice looking stills.

I did some color edits to try and show the way you can mesh the sky up better:


Or you can alter the color perspective of the image to try and match the other sky color if you really want it:


Either way, these are quick edits and depending on how many photo pieces you use, you may have a lot more work to do.  Keep everything on separate layers when you work, the black outline in the plants is a problem, you can use selective colors on that layer to knock out some of the darks.  If you intend to work this way, you could check out some of Christian Lorenz Sheurer's work as he has used a lot of photographs in his work that mesh very well.  But, he does a lot of painting too, so he can really make a piece come together.  Anyway, good luck. =D