Cellar BG (from sketch)

[Buckethead]

Howdy!

When it was still good weather I've made some sketches in the sun. This is one of them:



It suppose to be a cellar in a spooky house. I'll be adding detail later, I just want to know if I'm on the right track with this. I think there might be some issues with perspective.

I'm also unsure how to edit this with photoshop and turn it in a good looking BG.

Thanks in advance 

[auriond]

At first glance almost everything seems in order. Only the box and the lamp stand out perspective-wise. The bos seems almost as big as the door, and since it's that big I don't think we'd be able to see the top of it. Same with the lamp - I think the bottom of the lamp should curve downwards, and I don't think we'd be able to see the bulb. Hope you get what I'm saying - lazy to plug in the tablet and do a paintover, sorry ^^;

[radiowaves]

What are those stripes on a ceiling? How big is the cellar? Door seems to take half of the wall.

[Buckethead]

The stripes on the ceiling suppose to be a support. And it's a small cellar. I'll have a look at the box and lamp and see if I can fix them.

[Jens]

- big crate replaced by smaller boxes and typical cellar stuff
- added some shelves / a foreground
- changed the window (?) of the rear wall to a typical cellar window (which are, as i know them, small and very high to the ceiling as the rest of the room is subterranean)
- decreased door size, added some depth to it (inner wall part)
- changed lamp into simple light bulb
- kept the hatch (although i don't know where it leads to - even lower?)
- such a small cellar won't need a support (in my opinion) so I've put pipes there instead

[TerranRich]

Those support beams don't look like support beams. Sure, they do on the left side, but on the right, they end up looking flat against the ceiling, like painted stripes. Hope you get what I mean.

[Jens]

what TerranRich meant is the upper (especially upper right) part of the support thingie. To the right it ends up completely flat, like painted on the ceiling. a quick correction:

[loominous]

It's looks pretty interesting, and I'm glad that you're asking for advice early on, with the intention of doing the rest yourself.

Some stuff I'd look into:

Designwise:

-the room is currently pretty much a box, the probably least interesting shape. Try breaking it up, perhaps adding a large recess somewhere, a corner, whatever that makes it less symmetrical n boxy.

-much due to the symmetrical design of the room, the lamp has been placed in the center, along with the hatch. This, as with the room design, is a pretty boring solution, that with a little effort can be changed to create interest.

-the door is also placed in the center of the wall, as with the pillar.

Symmetry is a tough tendency to fight.

Compositionwise:

-the hatch, which I assume is the most important element is placed in the bottom of the screen, and centered. Try placing it off center in the middle somewhere to make sure our eyes, with the proper lighting, will be drawn there first.

-try placing foreground objects, like Jens did very creatively in his edit

Most importantly: Keep it loose n sketchy! Lay down blobs that represent stuff. If you're thinking about adding a pile of boxes, just draw mountain like shape with perhaps some scribbles inside it. As long as you know what it is, it's good. At this stage you're looking for a general impression, not details.

If you squint your eyes tightly n look at Jens edit, you'll pretty much only notice a large dark rectangle shaped thing infront of some white area. This is the general impression. These are the sort of large abstract shapes that are easy to forget when looking at pictures, but it's the basis of the whole thing, large blobs of values creating abstract interesting shapes n framing the subject. You don't have to think up exotic shapes for this either, a box placed next to a lamp can together form a really interesting shape together.

So my main advice would be: stop looking at the objects!, and work on the whole thing as if you were looking at some really out of focused picture, where you can't make anything out, but the shapes in themselves are intriguing enough. Lay down blobs that represents stuff, boxes, tables, windows, whatever, and compose them so they all pull the focus to one or two objects, which you think are the most important.

Good luck!

[Buckethead]

Thanks for all the paintovers and great advice. Looks like I'll have to redo the whole BG. But I'm pretty much up for that because I now know what to do and that should make it alot easier.

When I finish off a new background, I'll make sure to post it here.

Thanks once again! 

EDIT:



OK here's a new version. I tried to do most of the things suggested. I didn't really manage to draw anything new objects though.

What do you think?

[auriond]

Hey now, that looks great! Very atmospheric.

[TerranRich]

Damn, that looks good!

I'm trying to find something that could be fixed, but I really can't find anything wrong!

[Jens]

To my eyes, your current colorization lacks some contrast. The room and object shapes are hard to recognize. The light bulb offers you a good possibility to put more contrast into it by increasing the highlights and shadows depending on its light. As a general rule you should try to do the brightest areas of a picture as bright (close to white) as possible and the darkest ones as dark (close to black) as possible.
While painting, I usually use too few contrast, too and don't take notice of it until I use the paint-program's function to increase contrast, which makes the picture look much more lively than before.

[Snarky]

Nice edit (of a well-painted picture), but the halo around the bulb is going to screw up things when you put in characters walking around.

[Buckethead]

Thanks for both the comments and once again a wonderfull paint over by Jens. 

I'll defently have a look at the contrast. I really like the style you use Jens, But I'm afraid that I'm not skilled enough to completely follow it. But the paint over certainly gave me some ideas for improvement. Thanks alot! 

[TerranRich]

That's the problem with paint-overs: you have to keep consistent with other BGs.

[Jens]

Oh, sure, the paintover was meant to inspire Mr. Buckéthead, not to be directly taken-over as a game background. It was no big changes that I made, just a bit more darkening and brightening up.

For how to approach new backgrounds in the "loose'n'sketchy"-way as loominous puts it ("Lay down blobs that represent stuff"), have a look at the speed-paint- and time-lapse-videos on youtube. There are very good ones on it, showing perfectly how to proceed from a general layout to a detailed picture.


The Mysterious Cave
King of the Winter

End Game (Extended Version)
Matthias Verhasselt Speed Painting
Matthias Verasselt #2
Cold Bed Time
Demon Gate
One of the great character paintings by Sycra