Messages

ohhhhhh, photoshop elements =[  That's a bummer man, I did some fun stuff with your project just with adjustment layers.  Can you still use curves without an adjustment layer though?  On mine it's under the menu Images->Adjustments->and then there's a list of all kinds of adjustments.  They give a preview option of course, and you can go back in history but otherwise they're permanent adjustments.

Which one do you think that you could stand staring at for hours on end?   Any of them?  BTW... If I go with a different font, I will donate the Lady Ice SCI font to the AGS community.

Either Morris Roman or Gaelic as the best choices there, but honestly none of them are very nice to look at.

i think for character sprites it's better for the light to come from above, that way you can flip them if needed. You wouldn't need to flip this front pose, but for a sideways view it would look really weird if the lightsource would change when the character changes direction.

You're right, and I usually make two different side walk animations (like here) to avoid the weird effect you described. Though it can be called a time-wasting method, I guess.

SpacePaw: It is better now, even if a bit messy.

No, I agree with you.  Better to make two different side walk animations, put the extra work into it, rather than just flip it and be lazy.  I think when you put more work into it like that, that ultimately it will turn out better looking and not stale like all the flipped views tend to look.  But that's just my opinion.

I like the color choices, I think it looks pretty cool honestly.  Kind of alien and maybe a little 80s cartoon.

Well man, I'm going to have to surprise you and say that this is just about how every single amazing concept painting starts...looking like those roughed out colors and shapes.  Personally, I think that's probably a very good exercise, and I liked all of them except the snow one - and only because when I look at it, I see this adorable face. I don't know why...

=p  Yeah, regular practice for you and me both.  I'm getting a tablet (well, if I can dig it out of the bottomless dresser) soon from a friend, as she doesn't need her old one....so I'm excited to start getting away from the mouse for a change.  I really want to take a break from music and finish my game, and really invest a lot of years learning to do digital concept paintings...mostly because I spend so much time staring at them.  I know a lot, but I need to apply what I know more often.  So I always enjoy watching your progress, it's inspiring dude.  Keep at it.

I think the highlights in that are fine.  The problem I see is that there's just so much green, and it's a bit bland.  Hang on though...what do you mean by "own colour"? Is there some kind of rule in this style where you have to color everything in the same hue range?  I'm not sure what I'm trying to ask here, sorry.  I guess I'm just wondering why you chose to make the hut green/bluish green.  It mends too well with the grass and the middleground colors, for my taste.  *scratches head*

But I do like it. =D

haha nice wind power! energy conscious =p Woot.

Very nicely done, Andail.  I always like to accompany the pictures with words, so here goes. 

nihilyst: Basically you just needed to present a color perspective and value perspective to create depth (I believe you've established some value already, but maybe you could do more) - which is how I know these terms, they go by other names however to other people.  Basically separating the foreground, middleground, and background...which is basically what Andail has done.   Most of the time, you'll find that your darkest darks are in the foreground and progress lighter as you move back towards the background.   Color perspective would show that from the foreground to the background, it goes warm to cooler color.    Very simple things to keep in mind.  And that's about all that I can add.


Edit by ProgZ:  No need to quote an image directly above your post.

You could sure go in and start detailing everything a lot.  It looks washed out and bleh to me.  Smashing different photo elements together is a neat technique if you do it right, it takes an understanding of line perspective, shading and value perspective, color perspective, and then you can work at meshing everything together.  It's a lot of work, you can't cheat everything just by cutting out some nice looking stills.

I did some color edits to try and show the way you can mesh the sky up better:


Or you can alter the color perspective of the image to try and match the other sky color if you really want it:


Either way, these are quick edits and depending on how many photo pieces you use, you may have a lot more work to do.  Keep everything on separate layers when you work, the black outline in the plants is a problem, you can use selective colors on that layer to knock out some of the darks.  If you intend to work this way, you could check out some of Christian Lorenz Sheurer's work as he has used a lot of photographs in his work that mesh very well.  But, he does a lot of painting too, so he can really make a piece come together.  Anyway, good luck. =D

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:



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 .

I really like what you're doing here, Ben.  Ever since that last concept painting you were working on, I've been wanting to see what you'd come up with next.   I like the color perspective of the background a lot, pretty sweet.

I shouldn't be posting this, as it's horrendous and I only bothered out of sheer boredom.  It's not meant to be a solution to your problem in any way, but I liked the scene and wanted to mess around.  Had it not been a jpeg image (you shouldn't use jpeg), and wasn't full of garbage nonsense, I might have actually spent some time on it and made it look nice.  But with the way it is, that would require redrawing almost the entire image.  Meh.

I started by going over the grass and getting rid of the shadows, and maybe I don't understand your scene but to me I couldn't find a light source at night to explain the brightness of it all.  Anyway, prepare yourself for an extreme edit! =p  Obviously it doesn't have to be quite so dark, but it sure brings the hut into focus.  And another thing, I wouldn't do the lighting like that so much...I don't see why I should have to keep explaining myself though. *grin*

Haha, nice one Andail, he does look crazy now

Yes, very crazy....crazy angry about something down on the ground. =p

Not that I have been much help anymore to this.. but your doing a bang up job!

That's ok Joe, no worries.  Thanks for the kind words =D

Hey hey.  Well it has been a while.   I actually haven't been working on this for a while, I'm recording a whole bunch of records this year so my time to work on this game has been slimmed down.  I did get to it today though a bit, and I decided to finish working up the vehicle sprites and corrections for Cotton Cove that I needed to do.  Here's a quick look at that:



I changed the phone booth, sidewalk and the fence.  They felt off, and I hope that it looks a bit better now, it feels better to me anyway.  Cheers.

I like that tutorial, pretty neat.

In other news, your branches seem elastic or maybe stretchy.  It's like they suddenly shoot out like Mr Fantastic shooting his arms out to grab some coffee from across the room.  But branches can be in all types of configurations and twists and turns, so your branches aren't totally wrong but the way the leaves seem to sit in a pile on the tip-top of them really adds to the weirdness.  Good to see you're working on some art though, everyone goes through these tough stages, just keep at it.

Willing Well II: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness - Coheed and Cambria

But doesn't Obama have a vice-presidential partner too? If so, who is he/she? Why have they never been mentioned? Are they just incredibly dull so that the media doesn't have any scandals to report about them?

Joe Biden.

Yeah he's nobody....like a Joe-six-pack, if you will.

So now heavily retarded people are monsters?

And heavily retarded monsters are human beings.

But, I like monkeys myself, just not the Pongos.  I'm sorry, I'm an Ape-ist.  ;]

But seriously, the Last Stand of the Orangutan states that consumer awareness and general education is actually low on the list of solutions in terms of impact in the short-term, and low to possibly moderate in the long-term.  It's nice that we're all becoming aware, but if they don't keep these people out of the forests, it's not going to change much of anything.  Now that's not to say you shouldn't avoid buying the products if you want to help out, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you're solving the problem either.

Also it's good to point out that the top consumer of palm oil is China, followed by other Asian countries.  You'll have to get your boycott going there to make any kind of impact.

I'm not really a fan of the coat in Misj's correction, I preferred the original coat more, it hangs out and is a big bulky stupid coat, just like my real coat. =]

Also the hands are strange to me as well, the wrists are sticks and the hands are boulders, seems wrong to me...I know it's a style thing, but even so.

Cool developments so far, though.

You could give the raptor some knees, elbows, maybe some more appropriate dino feet? :/  But hells yes that is one cute raptor, I would let it eat me.

Here's another raptor to get ideas:
http://www.healthstones.com/dinosaurstore/papo_dinosaur_toys/papo_velociraptor_dinosaur_toys/papo_velociraptor_dinosaur_toys.jpg

Actually the one in that picture looks a bit cute too, if you gave your raptor a more raptor-y face with teeth and stuck its tongue out and such like your current pic, it'd look like a raptor and still be adorable. Maybe....