my first background. advice please!

[Fusiomax]

well this is my first background.
by hand:

yeah i know not very good but it served well as a guide line

heres what i ended up with after line art and a basic coulouring:

again yeah its rubbish, but i only spent ten minutes on a basic coulouring just so it was done

incase your wondering that thing on the branch is well its a.....a bear/koala thing it has to stay there 

main thing i dont like is the base of the tree how could i improve it? also the branch of the tree.
also is it to many colours?

Thanks.

Fusiomax

[Andail]

You seem to have painted your picture based on a symbolic recollection of what a house and a tree looks like, instead of looking at an actual scene and painting what you see.

Instead of getting dozens of neat little tips about how you can add a flower here and a squirrel there, I think you should go out and find a scene that you like and sketch it up using pencils and paper. Or, use a photography.

[Fusiomax]

actually that sounds like a perfect idea, and i live across the road from a park that happens to have a house attatched to it for the park keeper.
thanks.

coulkd you sort of expand the statement of

You seem to have painted your picture based on a symbolic recollection of what a house and a tree looks like

primarily the SYMBOLIC recolection part?

Fusiomax

[Andail]

Certainly.

What I meant is that you've painted symbols. This is very common for people who don't paint much, and you'll always find that children do it. You paint from memory, and conjure mental icons of certain objects. What does a tree look like? It's brown and has a thick vertical trunk. What does a house look like? It has a rectangular shape, a door and a number of square windows. How does a sky look? It's bright blue and has white clouds, and often a bright yellow sun. Grass is green and is occasionally decorated with grey rocks.
Then you apply all these objects on a big white screen, and voila, you've got a picture.
Everything in primary colours, straight on.

This is boring. Challenge your mental symbols - find new colours, new perspectives.

[Fusiomax]

hmm well thats very insightful.
by the way whats the symbolic representation of the bear/koala thing?
also those rocks need to be there.

Fusiomax

[Technocrat]

Well, I can see where you're going with the pencil drawing, but I suggest a couple of things...

1) Widening the path so that it's at least the same width as the door - how often have you seen a path so much smaller, or that was lop-sided in terms of which side of the door it went towards?

2) Something to give the house more of an impression of depth. At the moment, it could be a cardboard cut out placed on a lawn - maybe make part of the side wall protrude over the fence on the left?

[Fusiomax]

@Technorat
on 1) i see it a lot around here

and 2) that is a good point i was also going to add some texture to the wall wheere you can see batches of brick work also change it to an earthy brown/orangy colour.

Fusiomax

[Zyargeikunn]

The resolution of the picture seems to be 543×341. Is this intentional? I don't know which resolution your game is, but I would recommend 320x200 (or 320x240) based on the picture you posted, cause it's much easier to make a fine looking lo-res-background.

And the windows are very big and very very white and incomplete. Either you should make them show a reflection or show what is on the inside.

Edit: Plus, you shouldn't use JPEGs for Pixelart, they tend to mess with pictures, PNG is much better. While you used high quality JPEG it is not showing that much, but there are strange lines next to the outlines that make paintovering a drag.

[Fusiomax]

you know i didnt even think of the resolution haha.
i suppose that is rather important thing to consider.

those strange lines are where i did it on lined paper because that's all i had to hand.

this is all a lot harder than i thought when i first decided to make the game

Fusiomax

EDIT: here's my new version just the line art at the moment:
what do you think?

EDIT 2: heres it with colour and detail:

how is it?

i also toyed with the idea of a wall/fence heres what i have:


what do you think is better?

also how can i make the grass better? I am a bit disapointed with it.

I will be colouring and adding details later this evening.
one problem i have is i havnt got a god brick red can anyone help me out?

Yes the windows are still plain i dont want to see inside im not really wanting to put curtains but i cant seem to be able to get a sort of "glare" if you know what i mean. so how would you suggest to do that?

[Snarky]

That's much better, actually quite good indeed.

There's a bit of inconsistency with the perspective (particularly since you've copied-pasted some bits to multiple different places in the picture), and the steps don't make a lot of sense (you go up a staircase, but the door is still at ground level?) unless the grass is on a slope, which it doesn't look like.

Also consider how you're planning to use this background. With the wall, the sidewalk is out-of-frame (unless the sidewalk is behind the wall, which makes no sense), which would make it difficult (not impossible, but hard to do in AGS) to have a character walk there.

Next steps would be to work on the coloring and probably change the outlines from black to something closer to the colors of the object.

[Fusiomax]

I have no real idea when it comes to perspective can I get any help there?

Fusiomax

[Zyargeikunn]

For simple rectangle shaped things like the pillars, just look at any simple perspective tutorial in teh interwebs. The window things will be a bit tougher though (I think), a simple way to make it look better would be to simply make them symmetrical (or maybe just flipping one of them might do the thing, but I think that might look weird).

BTW, I love the coloring (except for the still too white windows), even the strange unfitting light blue is interesting.