Ben304 tries painting. Yet again.

[ThreeOhFour]

I know I seem to start one of these threads every 2 months. Sorry about that 

I realized the other day that I had tried my hand at doing a non pixel style of background for ages and it is something that I keep wanting to learn. Seeing as I had some free time this evening, I thought I'd take another shot at it. It's about dang time, really.



Most of the elements here are inspired by Loominous' various backgrounds, but I kept the layout pretty simple for now because I didn't want to break my head trying to draw all sorts of neato stuff. I'm actually fairly happy with how both the foreground and the background turned out, but I know that there's new techniques you guys can teach me, so I eagerly await your critics! If there is a single thing I have to point out that I dislike it would be the lack of texture on the grass.

Technique wise I used 2 layers for this image, one for the sky, clouds and moon and one for the hill and shack. To do the background I used a large soft edge brush with the pressure sensitivity set to opacity and size, and to do the foreground I used a small soft edged brush with the same settings. I forgot to time myself but I'm guessing it was somewhere between 15-30 minutes (a long time, I know  )

As with all the past times, your time is very much appreciated.

[SpacePaw]

ok first of all 15-30 minutes isn't bad at all - especially for a nice looking basic background
I dislike the blury skies and moon. They should be at least a little bit sharper. The "painted" feel of your work is very nice though and reminds me of works done in "Corel Painter".

To make it look better and more detailed you just have to make brush smaller and smaller and refine everything in iterations

Same thing with doing grass - start with shadowy and highlited big spots on the grass and refine them until they look good (ie. like grass)

[Andail]

When you attempt to emulate another person's art, it's important not to take short cuts just to create quick look-alikes...I think here you have focused too much on style and atmosphere instead of looking at the basic craft of painting.

First of all, I think you should have a more solid idea of what you want to paint, and get some references. You need more substance in your picture before you start shading and applying lighting effects.

At this point, the scene is too dark and too uniformly blue, and the moon is too out of focus.

[ThreeOhFour]

Thank you for the comments .

Andail, with regards to using reference images, I hear this a lot but nobody has ever explained the proper way to use reference images. Should I just google a picture of a house and try to paint it as best I can? What's a good starting point for a reference image, what sort of things should I look for in a reference image?

[Ghost]

Reference pics can be used in many different ways, and they are indeed a good way to learn "from the pike":

- collect photos/drawings to study them, paying attention to certain basics like perspective, lighting, angle and such, and eventually try to copy such a picture to get a feeling how to construct the image (light colours first, details last, and whatnot)

- collect photos/drawings as "reference material"- this sounds pretty obscure but is an old trick. Many a great fantasy/horror creature has its roots in an artists' collection of photos of lettuce, rust, or even exploded marshmallow.

When working with an paint program that has layers, a good trick is to get a certain photo and simply use it on a background layer to trace over.
As for "what to look for"- try to find references that have the things in them you want to achieve. In your picture there's a certain glum atmosphere and a prominent moon/cloudy sky element, so getting some landscape photos of a full moon would be a good point to start (for some reason it makes me think about the movie poster for Arachnophobia, which also had this large, centered moon).
With the proper syntax you can get almost everything out of google 

All this is, of course, only a small selection of how to use references. I bet there are a thousand more.

[Evil]

- collect photos/drawings as "reference material"- this sounds pretty obscure but is an old trick. Many a great fantasy/horror creature has its roots in an artists' collection of photos of lettuce, rust, or even exploded marshmallow.

As an student getting their Bachelors, I must say that this is super important. My harddrive recently failed and I lost most of what I had, but before that I had TONS of photos just for inspiration. I had my photos folder sorted into all sorts of topics, like cool designs or logos, textures I liked, color pallets, awesome conceptual work by other artists, and several folders for projects that I planned on working on in the future. Then when you start work on a project, you'll have a bunch of points of "reference" for what you want to do. Not something to copy from, but something to mimic.

Rust is a great example. Depending on your project, rust could look many different ways and will depend on not only the material and location of the object, but the shape and contours of the object too. So placing this texture directly on this object won't work because of the objects unique qualities. But if you notice that rust pulls up in some specific places, or tends to form in a certain way, it'll give you a better idea of how to apply it to what you're working on.

Architecture and landscapes work the same way. Don't necessarily copy directly from them, but notice attributes that you like about the reference and what makes them "work" visually. Basic structure and perspective are the most important, like Andail said, but plan you're designs around what features you think would make this work visually interesting.

As for your image, I think you're on the right track. I had a few issues with the lighting in the shadow of the building, but I had just come from outside and after looking at the image for a while it cleared up. I think the design is well done and the would work great as a background. Something about the lower left corner bothers me. Something about the hill. Cloud positioning looks good with the layout of the building so I wouldnt change that. Maybe a sign or a tree or something to fill that space?

[Takyon]

Great background, would be nice a bit sharper but overall it's a great piece of work imo.

[loominous]

I suggest that you try to design the landscape and building as you would a spaceship or whatnot - forget references and just go with some shapes that look cool and exciting, and focus on getting the silhouettes interesting, as they have the greatest impact on us.

Learning from references isn't of course bad, but the main thing in my opinion is simply to learn to create interesting shapes that composed together form a pleasing whole, and which guides the viewer to the focal points of your choice. This often starts by very loose sketching, where you create flowy shapes that you then later refine into whatever you want it to be.

I personally almost always use a textured brush, which has a watercolory look to it, to get rid of plain surfaces, and also to add some details, kinda akin to the "details" you get for free in lo-res with dithering. Not sure how recent this file is, but I think it's the brush I use 99% of the time (photoshop).

Good luck with your hi-res experiments!

[ThreeOhFour]

Thanks for the comments all

I already have a few images for inspiration and such (about 500 I think) but these are all other people's illustrations, not photos. I am sad to say that I find looking at photos of houses pretty boring 

A lot of the time I draw inspiration by playing other people's games and seeing the art in them - both pro and indie - so I guess you could say I look at reference material every day nearly.

Anyhow, I didn't really intend to dwell on any one painting for too long, as I really want to build up my ability to create a background in a reasonable amount of time and with consistent quality, so I moved on . This one is done with the 'design a spaceship' idea, where I drew silhouettes first and then detailed.



I went a little crazy with the colours, yeah .

Again, not sure how long this took me. I did a version earlier, but didn't have the sky as a seperate layer, and I wanted to add clouds and mountains in with the ease that layers provides, so I started again. I figured the practice couldn't hurt, really.

This one probably took 30-40 minutes I guess. Again I forgot to time 

loominous, thanks for the brush. I might have a play with it to see if I can lose some of the 'stroky' feel I have going on here!

Thanks again for your time so far, folks

Edit: Not sure whether this is worth posting, but I tried doing a scene with Loominous' brush... I seem to have had more trouble defining shapes here, but that might also be due to the difference in setting, colour and such. I timed this one and it was 26 minutes



And yes, I will try drawing with normal daylight colours soon. But I find that very hard to do!

[loominous]

They're definately getting more interesting!

It might be worth trying to get more layers in there, not as in photoshop layers, but image elements, and position them in a zig zaggy pattern, where the eye is lead back n forth going back through the image.

Here's a crude edit of the first image:



Old one for comparison



With more depth you start losing the nice naive feeling of the original, but if you want to take it more towards normal paintings this is probably the way to go, and you can still incorporate it in flatter stylized styles, but then limit the depth between the layers.


I also added some extra light in the centerish area, to get a focal point in the center area of the image. In this case it leads the eye to the back of the image, as the contrast is boosted in the center mountain area, which is kinda crap, as there's not much there to look at, but it was more done to make a point and make the values more dynamic.


About brushes: I think the most important thing is consistency. In the first image in the thread, you had the soft brush vs hard, and in the last one you have these sharp edges vs the brushy textury.

There's of course nothing wrong with using different brushes in a piece, but keeping the silhouette edges consistent helps make it feel like one piece instead of a collage. If you're using a textured brush, you will always have some jitter in the edges, even if you're doing something smooth like a ball (unless you reduce the size of the brush to a single pixel), and while having this jitter may seem unmotivated, it will look natural in a pic where everything has these edges.

Oh, and using a textured brush takes a bit of practice -- it's easy to get the impression that you can let the brush do all the work and get discouraged when things don't immediately look good -- but it mostly helps you in breaking up clean edges and surfaces, so you'll still have to create the actual texture of the surfaces yourself.

[Trent R]

So I started playing with Hue/Sat in Photoshop on your picture, and then switched over to Channel manipulation.

By subtracting the blue channel entirely:



Awesome. And now my wallpaper too.
~Trent

[ThreeOhFour]

Loominous: I've been quite unsatisfied with the flat feel of my background lately, and I really, really love that zig zag composition idea! Thanks!!! I probably haven't done the ultimate example here, but I had a shot:



I've stuck with the standard brush for now so that I can get a feel for creating depth and such... I'm pretty pleased with most of this image considering it was, again, a speedpainting. I have to say it's a really good feeling sitting down to make and image and knowing how I'm going to compose everything, so thanks! It has certainly made doing this more fun! Also, I tried using all one type of brush here (except for the 'sun') so the clouds are drawn with a hard brush as well, which I hope turned out okay.

Trent: Hah, your colour scheme is crazier than mine ! I never thought one of my scribbles would be wallpaper material  8)

[Ghost]

That last one really is very good, sir! Just missing the jellyfish next to the lamp 

[loominous]

Looking nice!

One thing you could try out is to offset the composition to one side. Right now they're quite symmetrical in that everything sort of balances in the center.

Assymmetry is a nice tool to create additional interest, and an compositional offset like this is a nice foundation for a more dynamic pic.

Another thing that you could try is to place the most interesting elements at the focal point. In the latest one you have a few cool rocks at the focal point (the lower center bright spot), but the most interesting spots are probably the lamp n the tunnel, so I'd try getting the focus around areas like that.

With a composition like the current one, you sort of even out the interest, sort of saying: "look here, here, n here, these parts are equally important/cool", which is fair, but it usually pays off to focus on a particular element and build the whole thing around it, which usually leads to a more "powerful" image.

Anyway, it's looking much more "painterly", so I guess you're on the right track!

[ThreeOhFour]

Hah, well spotted Ghost, and I didn't even notice until 5 minutes after I'd drawn it .

I like the idea of trying an asymetrical composition, Loom, and tried this:



But I get the feeling that even though I've offset what I thought was the 'main focus' (the water tank) everything still leads back to the centre. I might have another shot at asymetrical composition, because to me this all feels very evened out still. Thanks for the tip, anyhow!

[Takyon]

I like that one a lot. I think maybe the sun could be more prominent and the clouds less so though, might help I'm not sure.

[loominous]

Think it's progressing great!

One reason why the tank doesn't get much focus is that we're attracted to detailed areas, so the rather plain silhouette of the tank won't pull much attention, or it might, but we'll leave it immediately to explore more exciting areas.

Another thing is framing of elements. As opposed to the tank, the farm is nicely framed by the landscape, clouds and tank, which form a rectangle of sorts around it.

So by contrast, the farm is nicely framed, has interesting details, and with the bright background spot placed right behind, has enough contrast to pull most attention and keep the viewer there.


One thing I'm noticing is that the horizon line is really low in all pics, and since the skies so far haven't been terribly exciting, it might be good idea to reframe the pics to show more ground and less sky, or possibly go with a more widescreeny format, where you'd simply crop out the upper regions.


But I think the last one looks really great, particularly considering the pretty rough state it's in! (when going with painterly approaches, the image often looks quite crap before refinement is begun, which can be discouraging, but something you just have to ignore)

[ThreeOhFour]

Thanks for the tips! I can really see how the farm is 'bordered in', that's really interesting. Also, it makes perfect sense that the more detailed structure holds the attention for longer. Here I have tried to take the focus of the image away from the centre, and gone with a completely asymetrical approach:



My intended focal point here is the windmill, with the tree being a secondary one. It's pretty rough, but it still took me 35 minutes.

I didn't really spend ages on colouring here, and I think it's probably a step backwards palette wise, but I think the whole composition is probably nicer. I tried to raise the foreground as well, seeing as they've all been pretty low as you mentioned.

I almost added a foreground element, but I was worried about over emphasising the left hand side so I just left it as it was. I also tried drawing mountain ranges in the background instead of just rock formations (because one must experiment, right?) and turns out I failed pretty miserably  .

Edit:

Tried doing another image with an offset focal point, this time to the other end of the screen:



Hopefully this palette is a bit more effective than the one on the windmill (I messed that one up from the very start by not using a dark enough purple, I think). Although now I've possibly gone a bit too dark. Sigh.

[Dualnames]

If you make a game like this I'll make a game about your life...I swear!!

[ThreeOhFour]

Bahaha nobody wants to play a game with that many awkward moments

But, yeah, the whole point of this whole excercise is to improve to the point where I can do this style of background for games. Because I'm really sick of my pixel backgrounds.

So.

I did this one here with the intention of seeing how well one of my sprites would fit in with it. The original picture is here:



I then got a sprite which I had drawn earlier, resized the background from 640x480 to 320x240 and then I pasted the sprite over the top:



I feel it matches in fairly well, but am also interested to hear what you guys think. Probably one of the main things would be that I need to do more refining to the background first, I guess.

If I did a game like this I'd still be able animate the characters pretty quickly but have (hopefully) nicer looking backgrounds... however I am aware that people get a bit wary when two different methods of illustration are used in a single game.

I think the low saturation of the sprite makes it really pop out, especially with the outline, and while I think this is a good thing, I am aware that it might not be. So... any thoughts?

Also, any tips on the background as well, of course. I tried to incorporate the things I have learnt from the earlier images into this one, of course .