C&C on Pedro's Background Tutorial Result

[Moresco]

Hey there.  Ok so this is pretty simple really, I followed the tutorial but wanted to make it different.   I wasn't sure what to put in, I came up with this:



I'm not happy with the door's peep-slider thing.  It's not right somehow, but I'm not sure.  You know, I was going to throw in a gambling table, but with the colors and all it was screaming "hotdog stand" and i just had to go with it. 

I don't know, it's pretty basic isn't it?  Well it didn't take very long.  What took the longest was the hotdog stand.  I did the shadow with that alt-click deal in photoshop to blend the layers.  Basically it was all black and then I moved the slider to get the right kind of shadow feeling.

So I've hit a wall then,  what should I add to this? I think I'll change the wall colors and design or something and see what kind of warped-ness I can make.

Comments?

[Gilbert]

One thing that bothers me is that the door is of a wacky shape, which is fine, but the room itself was drawn with a okay perspective, you should either draw the room in a more wacky style OR fix the door to look more normal to make the background more consistent.

[Krazy]

The hot dog stand looks good, but doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the rooms shaded no outlines style. You could either remove the black outlines on the stand or make the rest of the room have the black outline style. Whatever you like.

[Khris]

A pre-rendered character would look great in this background

Seriously, there are 3 different styles in that pic.
The hot dog stand looks great, why don't you paint everything in that style?

[Babar]

the repeating ...doll..(?) in the background is kind of distracting.

[Moresco]

Yah that door is really funky isn't it?

Yah I like the way the hot dog stand ended up, so I went ahead and did all black-outlines like you suggested, but I'm not sure I like the black-outline style now that I did the whole pic that way. 

Pre-rendered character?  I see you winking and think there's a joke here, but I'm totally missing it...

Three different styles?  Point them out please so I can see it too? That'd be a good thing.

Yah so like I said, I did everything in all black outlines.  Even black outlines on the yellow carpet thread?  I wasn't sure but I did that too.  I didn't fix the wacky funked out door, sorry.
I removed the distracting dolls, and added in some equally distracting stuff? Yah, take a look-see.

Here it is:

[aussie_unplugged]

That's a nice background you've got there.

IMO you should probably either stick with black outlines or remove them altogether. Otherwise it probably doesn't "fit" in.

Also, your foreground objects are antialiased, which could be a pain in case you want the character to walk bheind them.

But it's great. I'm glad that tute is being helpful to people.

[TerranRich]

If you don't like the outlines, try changing all the outlines to a darker shade of whatever color it's bordering. For example, around the doors use a darker brown outline (near black), and around the umbrellas, use a darker red and dark gray outlines around the red and white of the inside colors, dark gold around the yellow stripe on the carpet, etc. Do you know what I mean?

[Moresco]

TerranRich:
I totally get what you're saying.  In the second pic I went all black outlines though, I'll probably leave the image as that unless I can think of something to add.

Aussie:
Yah I really liked that tutorial! You really can make a good background in no time flat! 

EDIT:
Ok Aussie, I see what happened, but I'm not sure how it happened.  If you look, the lamp and the grandfather clock are not like the other foreground objects - odd, I never switched on antialias, unless there's a keyboard shortcut that I leaned on accidently?

Here's the final edit with the corrected foreground objects:

[aussie]

I think it looks great. It has a real RON feeling about it.

[Khris]

Three different styles?Ã,  Point them out please so I can see it too? That'd be a good thing.

The walls: color only, straight
The door: wacky
The stand: outlined, straight

You put black lines on the walls, but the door's still standing out, IMO.
And the foreground objects need depth, especially the clock. It looks like a cardboard cutout.

[Moresco]

No more wacky doors...

Here is the one without the wacky door.  You know I thought I posted this, but I guess it must've gotten lost with some window popping up over it.  Well, here it is:

[ildu]

Those shadows don't make a lot of sense. If the items in the front cast such shadows, why are they solid black at where the light comes from? The whole point of having such silhouetty objects in the front is to create depth and give detail. If you start giving them shadows, you attract too much attention to them and you get the player puzzled, and not in a good way.