Question About Drawing

[Armageddon]

Hello again. So I haven't drawn anything so I'm not sure if this goes here but I have a technique type question.

So lately I've been wondering why my art sucks so much and I think I've figured it out, I'm no good with colour.



I saw this image and really quite liked it, I can do all the shapes and composition and perspective, but I'm at a loss when it comes to clouring. I was wondering how you would go about drawing stuff like the gold lining in that image? Is it all done by hand with a limited palette, or is it auto antialiasing on the pencil tool? It just looks so nice. All the edges in the image really. I guess I'm just asking for advice on how to make a proper colour palette and colour in backgrounds. Should I not use black outlines? Maybe that's it.

Again sorry if this is in the wrong section.

[Anian]

Depends on what style you're going for. More realistic will have that kind of lining on the columns, more pixely will have the same but with dithering and cartoony style will have 2-3 shades (shadow, normal, lit).

It's kind of hard to tell what style this is, it's kind of a mix of everything right now.

[Khris]

There's one simple technique that'll generate nice AA like in that background: draw everything using flat shapes at twice the resolution, then scale it down using bilinear/bicubic filtering.
The final step is adding finishing touches.

[Armageddon]

That's a good idea Khris, I'll give it a try.

[Monsieur OUXX]

Also, specifically about the gold effect (or reflection effects in genral), you don't really need to master the technique of it, you can just achieve that by using tricks :
- a very high contrast (the dark bits are really really dark)
- random alternance of lighter bits and darker bits, preferably arranged in stripes of various widths.

The two following pictures sum up what I mean :

[Armageddon]

How do you plan to draw your backgrounds of the proper scale? I have trouble with most of my stuff being out of proportion, and my character sprites not fitting it. Do you just draw and adjust, or just leave the character sprite on a top layer?

[Khris]

I usually do the latter.
You could also use a semi transparent layer with a 3D grid with its lines a meter apart for instance. This will establish the perspective of the background and give you a perfect reference for sizing things.