My first bg..

[Marley_brother]

This is my first real bg.. I'm still newbie but i'm getting better. What do you think?

[Marley_brother]

I've changed pretty much now but before i upload it I need to do something with the water. How do you fix water so it looks good?

[ravenfusion]

Nice background, pretty good for a first. As for the water, how about ripples? Reflection?

[Marley_brother]

I don't know how to do this water-thing so i didn't do that.

[Mr Jake]

hope you didnt mind, I did a paint over with the water.



The lines in the water are very simple but I think they match the style.

to do the reflection I used Paint Shop pro and used the layer tool to make the water transparent and flipped a copy of the mountains to place under that layer.

[Damien]

Here's my edit, all done in MsPaint:


And here's what I did, and how I did it:

1.drew the outlines of the beach, mountains and cactus

2.shaded them, used three gradients of color for each: darkest for shadow, lightest for highlights, and medium for midtones

3.created a sky gradient using freehand and fill, and drawing the sun

4.added texture to the water:
a)copied the mountains, flipped them around the x axis, and scaled them on the y axis, then painted them in more blueish tones
b)created a gradient that gets darker with depth starting from the sandy beach
c)created suns reflection by drawind random lines


What You could do next is add some (subtle) noise to the sand and the mountains, draw some shells on the beach, some thorns on the cactus, etc, It's all in the details


Hope this helps.

[Marley_brother [guest]]

Ok, thanks for the help.  Now i know how to do better shadows and things like that.

[Opo Terser]

Yeah it seems a little late now, and I didn't really stay with the original idea but whatever: done in paint as always. get ideas and stuff i guess

[Mr Jake]

if you dont mind me saying, waht was the point in that paint over???

[Privateer Puddin']

same point as yours? to give the original image some ideas?

[Phemar]

if you dont mind me saying, waht was the point in that paint over???

Who cares? It looks 10x better than any of the other paintovers, and if it were human I'd marry it, irrelevant of it's sex...

[Mr Jake]

Thats my point, there was no point to a paint over that just says 'look, I can do it better'

[Nacho]

Thats my point, there was no point to a paint over that just says 'look, I can do it better'

WTF? So, if someone can do a better job than the original posted did he/she can't post it? That's stupid, CL is opened, everybody can post and everybody can paint over if not explicitly told not to do.

I think that paint over is fantastic, and, even assuming that Opo's style is difficult to archieve some ideas can be extracted of it.

[ravenfusion]

1. It's not even the sameÃ,  background anymore, it's not really a "Paint-OVER".
2. If you're gonna post paint-overs/re-paints, atleast explain what you did.

Oh well, that's my opinion on it... But the art is good and you should be able to pick up ideas from it.

[Marley_brother]

Hey, I don't care if it was a paint-over or not! It was so damn good done!

[Opo Terser]

yeah sorry about redoing it, i know i kinda went overboard but i was just having a good time you can get ideas from it mainly

yeah i'll try to stick to just paint overs, but i was also trying to show some composition ideas too

[Phemar]

yeah sorry about redoing it, i know i kinda went overboard but i was just having a good time you can get ideas from it mainly

yeah i'll try to stick to just paint overs, but i was also trying to show some composition ideas too

No you did not go overboard...you were just fine, and don't give me that crap..Now go to your room mister...

But lets get back on topic...

[Mr Jake]

Opo: fair enough that you re-done it

but it gets annoying when some adds something to your BG and you think: 'oh, that looks nice' and they havent explained it

[MrColossal]

I agree, when I edit or paint over I give reasons for why I did something. Usually a long list and in some cases I write a mini tutorial.

The majority of people who help around here through editing art offer a list of things they changed and usually why they changed it.

Can you please start doing that Opo? Then your help will at least have more of a reason for beingin the thread and people won't get the idea that you're just showing off.

On the original art, I'm not a scholar on desert lakes but would a cactus be that close to a large body of water?

[Opo Terser]

Allright, I'll start explaining myself a little more. I just havent really been that big of a poster except for helping out here in the critics lounge, thanks