A beach - painting/bg

[Sam.]

this isn't for a game, i have just had some time recently to play around. here is whatÃ,  I have come up with. Suggestions welcome.

[Estaog]

I like it very much, remind me of summer days  .

But I'm not quite sure what does things at the bottom are, are they crops of some sort?

[Babar]

interesting. Is this based off your website image map? The sea will look strange if it is not animated though.
I am assuming those are reeds, but the shading on them looks a bit weird, and in some places it is blurry

[AndersM]

But I'm not quite sure what does things at the bottom are, are they crops of some sort?

This image might explain for Tanker what 'the thing at the bottom' is... 

[DoorKnobHandle]

Very good, but for me those cropthings fade too much into the actual beach sand... You should put a layer with gray ( opacity: 30% and blend mode to "overlay" ) inbetween the sand and the foreground/cropthing layer...

That will add a lot of depth!

[Estaog]

MrMasse:I thought so, just wasn't sure  .

[stuh505]

Looks good but the sky should be pixelated like the rest of the BG

[Reptile]

The sea and crab looks amazing. Keep up the good work! 

[InCreator]

It's a lovely scene!

Problem is, it's too plain and empty. Even if there's no things around, the amount detail of sand is quite low, compared to the sea.

I tried this and that, like

* giving much stronger contrast and variety to straw-like plants - so they would blend less into the sand and feel more realistic

* taking photo as and example and darkening sea as its gets closer to the horizon

* giving sand some holes and bumps by darkening and brightening almost randomly spots around

* giving sand higher amount of detail by adding a 12% of noise

Well, it worked, kind of... but colors are more aggressive now and it's whole scene gets more serious somewhat now, too.
Anyway, if nothing else - I hope that it'll give you  at least some ideas for next bee-gees.

[stuh505]

InCreator, your comments are good but you've introduced even bigger problems in your edit that make the new one worse imo.

firstly, by adding texture to the sand, you have made it look like a vertical flat wall because you have applied uniform texture.  without texture, we could easily imagine the sand to go backwards and just assume any texture is too small to distinguish.  i thought this looked ok before.

also, your image is really large and slow to load and now it appears to be a broken link...not sure why.  anyway, the uniform gradient applied to the sea doesn't look good.  yes the sea should get darker, but this should be done by hand (pixelated)...and it shoudl not be so gradual.

the color of the grass is now not as good...and there is too much darkenss especially at the top, it takes away from the sunny look

[DoorKnobHandle]

To get rid of the gradient, select the sea, copy it, create a new picture, paste the sea, go to "Image" and then to "Mode" and click on "Indexed Color". Then choose "Local (Perceptual)", choose a color amount (I would choose 10), make sure you use "Dither: Pattern" and click ok.
Now it should be pixelated. So copy it and paste it back in your picture (in the right layer of course).