This afternoon, I was playing around with a few ideas for making more "realistic," yet painted, rooms. Any thoughts or critiques on this? There isn't any real design -- just a chair in a room (zoomed to 640x400).
[IMGzoom]http://i.imgur.com/fprBMnI.png[/IMGzoom]
The only thing that seems a little bit off is the front of the seat cushion. The perspective seems to be slightly off.
Looking good though, well done.
It does look weird... thanks! It's funny how you can miss something until someone points it out.
I think the bookcase also needs a little depth on the left, but adding anything looks odd. Hmm...
Looking good, but I can't help feeling I'm looking at a dollhouse. I suspect it's mainly the wallpaper pattern, but something makes this look tiny.
I can see what you mean, Khris. Although it's not completely out of the ordinary, now that you mention it, the pattern looks a little too large for the scale (like in a dollhouse).
To all: You could call the technique that I was trying to figure out "traditional photoshoping." I know it's not anything revolutionary, but for me it was about honing a workflow for generating rooms. My normal routine for making a background with a painted look would be to draw a rough sketch and then paint over it. This image was composed by skewing different patterns, pasting together images, and then going back to shade the final result. er... Photoshoping...? Doing this allowed me to produce this in about an hour (while I was waiting for a phone call), whereas my old method would have taken much, much longer and more concentration. I also did not break out my tablet which hurt the precision a bit.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll try a few different things the next time.
The painting is a little low. It should be at least eye level. if we extrapolate the positoon of the normal height of a human, based upon a human sitting upon the armchair, we can conclude the painting should be at least 20px higher
I think that if there's anything particularly jarring, it is that the frame of the picture is sharply defined but doesn't appear to correspond with any of the walls, ceiling or floor. I think Khris is getting the sense of looking in on a dollhouse because it feels like a window, almost, looking in on a small scene. The single VP perspective is clean and well-executed, and you can easily fix any potential issues with squarish objects like the chair by giving their own VP on your established horizon.
Also, I partially disagree with Atelier about the height - if this is to be used as an adventure game background, if often behooves you to draw at more of an inclined viewpoint as it creates more floorspace for the character to walk on. More than anything else, it's probably best to establish what your angle of view is first and keep your rooms relatively uniform to that so that character sprites don't look odd, even if it isn't at an angle that's as aesthetically pleasing as you might like.
Painting and the light could be a bit higher and showing more of the room (yes I know you're just practising) would get rid of that "dollhouse" feel.
But otherwise this looks real nice.