Hand drawn backgrounds

[Chronos]

Here are 2 backgrounds i tried to draw with my poor skillsÃ,  ,i know this is just a concept for now but i need some critics and advice to improve them.
Its supposed to be an hermit's house on an island and some strange stones in the jungle

Ã,  Ã, 

I'd like to colorize them as well but i don't know how to do it maybe i ll have to paint over with gimp...

[G]

Well, I see you're not very decided. So I'll give you some advises:

-Make the sketchs with pencil, a soft one, erase everything you want, everytime you should do. Don't wory about how it looks like when finishing it.
-After finshing the sketch, tint it. You can make it directly over the same sketch and erase the pencil drawings... or you can copy the final sketch directly to another paper and tint it. Erase when finished.
-Scan it.
-Use a graphic edition program. I use Photoshop, but If you prefer Gimp, thats right for me.
-Think about the atmosphere of the game, colourful backgrounds? colourless?

And now some other advised, useful when drawing:
-Think about the composition, you should give nice camera views. The player must see everything, or almost everything. Place objects strategicaly.
-I don't like the place of the exit in the first picture (I supose it is an exit, that at the right-below corner), try making the path less curve. maybe you should use the tree like a Walk-behind and put the path behind it. Or directly from below... the decision is yours.
-Use soft pencils when starting a sketch, later use harder pencils to mark the drawings you like.
-Detail is important, but don't care so much. Use Gimp or Photoshop to give bump to leaves, wood, or another textures.

Remember, those are just advises. I hope them to be useful for you.

[Evil]

I got bored and played with some gradients.



Forgive me for abusing your image.

[Mr Jake]

The most annoying/dificult thing you will find while colouring it is that there are alot of double pixels and anti-aliasing which make it difficult to create an outline

[Chronos]

Thanks for the replies, i''ll draw with thinner pencils next time and then tinit it like you said G.
I'm using the Gimp because that's the only choice i have with Linux =P
I'm not sure about how to make the outline(i tried with bezier curves and then filling with color or gradient but it doensn't look like it was hand drawn anymore), i wish i could render it like some other drawings i ve seen on this board!

[Chicky]

Try using tolerance select then colourize the area. For example, select the hut wall and then use colourize to make it brown.

[Janik]

I think it's a very good start. The picture of the stones could use some filling out - as in, more jungle plants behind the stones area. Now it's just whitespace. Since you'll be assembling it on the computer anyway, you could make things easier on you by hand-drawing that area without the stones, and then just layer the stones on top. That way there's no worry about hitting the stones when you draw a tree.

The hut/palm tree one is pretty complete and looks very nice. The foreground path/walkable area could use some rocks or texture, but I guess that'll come in the coloring step.

You have some options for coloring:
1. Draw over the pencil marks with ink, scan, use the levels to get only the ink lines, and fill in the colors.
2. Scan the pencil image and redraw the lines directly on the computer. Then color.

[Chronos]

Yeah thank you all for the "coloring" and "levels" tips, that will be very usefull to me, i'm going to work on this and see if i can end up with a decent background.
I'll show a colored version if its not too ugly.

[Phemar]

Actually what I do sometimes is ink my images with a fineliner or something first, then scan it in and resize it in the gimp to the required resolution, then I load it in to MSPaint and fix up double-pixels and stuff.
Coloring methods vary though.