house, tree, land, river, need comments please

[Wakeman]

Hi, here is another picture. The house is belong to a small Chinese merchant family.




Probably a lot of things need improve this time. The roof is already the third I drew but it still looks strange. Also the grassland, not sure what I should do with it. I drew the tree according to one of the tutorial.

Please comment! Thanks a lot!

[deadsuperhero]

Not bad, but it seems rather plain. How about adding some texture?

[Ali]

I wouldn't worry about it looking plain. It's a clean style and I'd stay away from textures for the most part.

The problem is that the scene's composition is weak. It's nicely drawn, but the focus is off. My eyes are drawn towards the tree (which is very small) while the house is sliding out of vision. You introduced the image as a picture of a house, but I'm paying attention to the tree, the river and the roof.

You could try:

* Adjusting the image so that we can see the bottom of the front door.

* Adding aerial interference (tinting pale blue a little) to the landscape to make parts of it appear distant.

* Consider making the tree larger / the house smaller relative to one another.

* Use items in the foreground (bushes, trees,walls) to frame the scene and direct attention to the areas of interest.

* To make the grass look less flat, you could add the occasional cluster of small verticle lines. Check out the grass in Big Brother's style guide for the Sphynx.

[Gilbert]

I wouldn't comment on the overall skill or perspective parts, since I'll say they're at least functional.

What I'll comment on is the composition, here is a quick paintover (just a rough idea so I wouldn't even make the noise in the road and the details in the river):



* Moved up the house so you can see more the base of the door, otherwise it wouldn't be functional as an adventure game bg (unless it's not meant to be for an adv. game), since it's hard to have the character walk to the door if the path opens too low (as pointed out by Ali).

* Made you see more of the "sky" portion, just out of personal taste.

* Darkened the lines in the door and window, to make the outlines more obvious.

* Note also that the original image used MUCH more colours than needed, considering its style (most places looked like flat colours but in fact there're many colours which are too similar to make a difference), so I reduced it to 64 colours (IMO it can be even less), and I think there're actually not much degrade in quality which is not easy to spot visually.

[Wakeman]

Thanks for the comments! They are very useful!

I really had quite some difficulties when deciding the size and position of the house. I cannot make it too small, otherwise it will be disproportionated with the characters. Therefore, I will pabably choose to move it up a bit.

I will try to use those methods to make the grass land looks less flat.

Also..... sorry for my ignorance. How can I know which part of the picture used more colours than needed? And how can I reduce it?

Thanks again!

[Ali]

Also..... sorry for my ignorance. How can I know which part of the picture used more colours than needed? And how can I reduce it?

I think many of the extra colours would be in the noise texture you had on the path. Gilbot's edit got rid of that because it didn't really fit with the rest of the image.

One way to avoid unnecessary colours is to choose every colour you use and stay away from smudge, lighten, darken, dodge and burn tools. This will give you more precise control over the look of the image.

As for reducing the colours, that depends. Packages like the Gimp and Photoshop are able to reduce colours optimally, but MS Paint will do a very clumsy job. I don't think it's really essential for you to limit the number of colours you use, unless you're working on a 256 colour game. The important thing is that you choose your colours with care. As Gilbot observes though, there's no reason to have many colours that are virtually indistinguishable from one another.