First background.

[Sir Bob]

This is just a collection of gradients and burns, but it came out looking nice... I think...

[MarVelo]

This is a background? I dont get it?

[i k a r i]

A little critic...
It looks too "plain", I mean, the grass looks like a green floor, and so the water, maybe you can try to give them some "texture"...
Just like you did with the mountain...

[LGM]

It's not horrible, but there's no depth or texture.  I don't know which way is up, either. Is that "cliff" going up or down.

I'd suggest putting a little more effort into this guy before you put it up for critiquing.. There's not much to comment on, really.

[esper]

This is purposely crap. I did it in 5 minutes with Paint and a mouse, rather than my customary Photoshop or Dogwaffle with my tablet. I did it just to throw out some ideas for improvement, and so you couldn't just take my pic and mod it a bit to be your own.

Actually, when it comes to MS Psint and a mouse, I really do suck that bad...

First, you need to give your cliffs a little depth. rather than having a rolling green hill of grass going right up to it, have the cliff come out into the grass... and not with a flat edge, as there really are no such things as flat edges found in nature. You see on mine how the hill kind of rolls in and out, and the grass might pop up over it at times in individual stalks but the hill is still clearly on top.

Then, I added some shadow where the hill recessed. I did it with black pen, since I was using MSP, but if you are using a program (PSP, PS?) that has burns I suggest you use those.

Next, I textured (crappily) the grass. Actually show some stalks of grass here and there to give it depth and texture. Have the grass pop up over items behind them, like my addition of the rock and the stump. BTW, you should add items like that so your BG doesn't stay a green, blue, and brown geometry lesson. Variety is the spice of life.

I also added texture to the water as a shoddy series of almost-concentric ripples... with spikes, because a solid pen doesn't let you do nice smooth brush strokes like I would have wanted. I also put in a reflection of the sun. If you have the capability, you might want to put an alphablended reflection of the shore and maybe the cliff in the water too. I also thought that a tree stump growing so close to the shore might have a root jutting out into the water. You have to learn to think laterally instead of linearly when it comes to being creative.

Albert Einstein said "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, but imagination encircles the globe." Don't just picture a scene... grass, water, cliff. Think of what you might also see. I could have added flowers, sunbeams peaking over the clifftop, moss on the cliff, a trodden path where the grass has been laid down by passing feet, rocks sticking out of the water... I suggest you go look at the topic "C&C BG yo rly" (or something like that) to see exactly how the knowledge of how something should look (a room. Four walls, a door, a matress) can give way to imagination (boxes, shadow, windowpanes, pictures on the wall, a mousehole, wallpaper, etc.).

Finally, I also made a smaller cliff leading from the grass into the water, to give more of an impression that the cliff is up, the water is down, and the grass is in a plane seperating the two.

[seaduck]

Well, that's much better.

You could also try changing your point of view, let's say rotating the camera by some angle, 45 or 90 degrees or so, to the left or right. That will put the rock on one side, lake on the other.

With the new point of view you will be able to define the shapes of the rock and lake more and make them more recognizable.

I draw a super-fast sketch to illustrate the idea:



I left the perspective lines in.

Don't know if I am close enough to your intentions.

[sportyjay]

I do like the quick paintover by esper, it looks a bit scratchy as it was done very quickly in paint but it certainly does show your point. It almost looks ready to use.