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Doesn't seem to be available on my version, sadly.

Perhaps I should think about buying a full version of photoshop...

It's definitely my cheapo bundled version . I get that layer list, but all the curves layers have the little pencil with a cross through it icon, and a double click on these yields a message saying "This is an adjustment layer that was created in the full version of Photoshop and cannot be edited in Photoshop Elements".

Thanks, Dual

Regarding the layer list, this is what I get:



I also dug through the adjustment layer options looking for curves but could not find them in the list. Of course, I am still pretty new to Photoshop, so I might have missed something.

psd file of one of the backgrounds is here

I see what you're saying about the lack of intensity in the light, I guess I'll have to train myself to put stronger highlights in.

I tried looking at the psd you uploaded earlier, unfortunately I couldn't seem to view the adjustment layers. I'm curious as to whether this is because of something I have missed or whether because I am using a limited version of Photoshop, but I'd really love to be able to use curve layers, so I'm hoping it is just something I have missed.

Edit: I tried doing a quick sketch of a city style scene. A lot of things I am not happy with, really, but a start I suppose:

I thought I posted this... must be going a little crazy.

Thanks for the tips, Loom! That really is a very nice colour scheme you've done to the house, big thanks for the .psd file as well! I really love the way the blues work in the shadows! I'll dig in there and see if I can learn some things!

For now I have tried doing the other method you mentioned, where the sunlight is done last, not first:





I tried to clean the strokes up a bit without resorting to using a soft edged brush, although I will probably have a go at cleaning things up with a softer brush as well. I am still thinking that this might be a little dark, but not really sure.

Quick character test to see if I can manage to replicate the colour scheme accurately for a game:





I am actually pretty happy with the way this one turned out, I feel she matches the landscape fairly well.

Any thoughts?

Pixels are great because they are square.

And it's hip to be a square.



I think pixels are great because it lets someone with no background in illustration (me) create an image that is easily modifiable every time I get it wrong (which happens a lot), because I don't have to completely redraw it each time!

Also, similar to what Mash said, you learn things about other forms of drawing when you're lining pixels up. I know I approach larger scale pictures with the approach I have learnt doing pixels.

Also you can 'build' an animation without having to completely redraw each frame, which rocks when you have little or no patience (again, me).

Time for another experiment!

I decided to have a shot at doing some anti aliasing on a character by hand and also converting the background to a lower colour count to see if there are methods I can help my character sprites fit in with the scenery.

After doing the character animation frames, I exported them all as .png images then loaded them into Photoshop and individually placed AA pixels at 65% transparency where I would normally place an intermediate colour. This is a pretty slow process, but it means the character gets anti aliasing without being distorted, and the fact that one can flip frames in AGS makes it a little quicker.

I've built another little sample game which you can get here. There is a small gui up the top with four buttons - 2 change the character between anti aliased and normal, and two change the background between high colour and low colour. Know that I haven't done the walkbehind object in low colour, so it is not 100% accurate.

As for those who just want to look at more pictures without downloading:



If you look at the edge of the character closely you can see some intermediate pixels there.

Graphics wise, I had a lot of fun drawing this particular background and am really happy with how it turned out. I tried making the shapes of things a bit more interesting, and I'm not sure why all these warped curvy lines look good to me, but I really like the effect. Also I need to practice my walkcycle animations, because he has a very strange strut.

Happy birthday to vict0r and DanielH and all those other people I don't recognise 

Thanks bog, yeah the plan is to try making a game like this .

My next experiment was to try something along the lines of what Loominous mentioned earlier, about doing the sunlight first and then laying the colours over the top. I started out doing this simple scene with just two layers:



The 'sunlight' is represented by the sky colour and that funny blackish dot in the top right is the shadow tone. I tried a bit of a lower point of view, but other than that just kept the image pretty basic.

Next I layered colours over the top, each on a seperate layer (now I think about it, it is probably better to use a single layer for this) with each layer at some level of transparency so I could see the shape of the image. When all layers are set to 100% in the alpha blend it looks, hilariously enough, like this:



I then took the layers to a colour level I was reasonably satisfied with, in this case 20%, and ended up with this:



My thoughts on this experiment:

-I didn't use a very good sunlight colour. Sunlight should be a lot brighter!
-I should probably use some adjustment layer, but I was completely lost when playing with these and all of them did strange things to the image.
-I wasn't sure if there was a specific way to choose colours to put over the top, so I just chose colours at random. Really had no idea about what luminance/saturation to go for.

Actually, I read your post before doing that background, whereas the other two I had done before hand and thought to myself "I'd better do good composition here, because the other two suck".

I am vaguely aware of the arrow like effect, and tried to do this here, I'm pretty pleased that it actually worked out! I tried doing it before in the stone head background, but didn't think anyone picked up on it (maybe it wasn't so effective?)

I've been told off for doing tangents like in spot #2 before, and didn't notice this until you pointed it out. I'll try and make sure I keep these sorts of things out of the image from now on!

Thanks for the tips as usual!

Oh, very nice!

I really like the clarity you got with the face, great work

TheRedPress: Good luck with getting the tablet stuff started man! I wish I had been a bit more motivated to learn how to use mine but I'm trying to learn now. I enjoy concept art too, so I look forward to seeing your stuff

Loominous: Wow, very helpful post, thanks!

Yep, I do seem to be doing this backwards, but I really cannot stand illustrating with plain colours. Hopefully as long as I get all the steps in eventually it won't matter which direction I do them in .

Interesting approach to tinting, I'm completely ignorant of how to use adjustment layers properly (or at all really) but I've noticed your stuff really does have a very "sunlit" feel to it, which is very nice! Perhaps once I've worked out the whole painting thing a bit more I might try to learn a bit about adjustment layers!


I really like the way the sunlight looks on that image, that's a very eye catching effect, very warm! I'm definitely going to try doing something like this!


With regards to the composition, I totally agree that it took a step backwards for a while there. I was focusing on the shape of the buildings more than the background, which is quite silly of me. I see what you're saying about a high viewpoint, I'll definitely try to lower it a bit and sow what I come up with.


Regarding anti aliasing the character sprite, I have been thinking for a while of trying some hand done anti aliasing, so I'll give it a shot and see if I can achieve something workable here. I should be able to manually set a couple of alpha layers and do it like that, I hope.

Thanks for pointing out the dithering tool, I never thought to look in there 

Dirk: Haha, thanks, I don't know if my version can support plugins... I guess anything is worth a try. I'll keep it in mind for if I decide to do dithering


As for what I have been focusing on:

I thought a good thing to try would be an extended version of my 'sprite over background' experiment. What I'm concious of is that I need to be able to produce images that all look part of the same world, so I need to make sure my backgrounds all match each other to some extent. What I've done is create a 3 room example game, with no puzzles but just trying to make sure that I can effectively reproduce a background style multiple times for a game.

If you're interested in seeing how I went, the download is here (please forgive the lack of a few key animations and the slow walk speed).

I tried to make the scenes with a little bit of variety as to composition and subject matter, and I also tried a walkbehind object with an alpha layer (which turned out reasonably well).

If you can't be bothered downloading but would still like to see a screenshot, here is one:



I'm fairly concious that some parts of the backgrounds could stand cleaning up... also that there is not much in the way of interactivity potential there. I'm not really sure whether the best solution here would be to paint the interactive things or pixel them, as I'd probably have a fairly hard time animating something that is painted.

I am also thinking that it might be a better idea do draw a brighter character so as to help it 'pop out' from the backdrop.

Your thoughts would be appreciated.

I've got a ton of things I want to try now, so it's full steam ahead!

I didn't really explain it very well. I guess I didn't expect anyone to actually read it 

What I meant by objects having their 'own colour' is that instead of taking their hue for the lights and atmospheric lights, I would paint them with their natural hue. So rocks would be brown, instead of pink/blue/green.

I don't know why I made the house such a bland colour scheme. Probably because I was too lazy to mix new colours, so I took rock and grass colours 

Anway, in order to get some practice doing normal daylight colour schemes, I took 4 photos from a google search and tried to paint rough versions of them. I wasn't really trying to make look alikes of the photos, I am really just interested at the moment in getting some idea of what colours look like in sunlight:


(it's pretty big so I saved as a jpg instead of .png and thumbnail linked it)

For the most part I used a small brush, was at 100% zoom and kept my focus on just getting the general shape with the colours, instead of create an accurate painting.

I guess this shows that I still have a fair bit to learn. The rainforest and mountain are my least favourites, I think the two grassy hills are a bit better but show room for improvement as well. I guess if I do some regular practice at this sort of thing I'll get better .

J-Man, sorry but I don't know of any actual tutorials on tablet painting .

Interesting idea ProgZ - I just had a look in Photoshop to try it but I have a cheap, watered down version (it came with the tablet) and it seems to be missing a lot of features, including this one . I'm not sure if going for a 'dithered' look is what I want, but it'd be fun to play around with, of course . I'm willing to try a range of things to see what happens

As for doing contrast, yep, that's next

Anyway, last night I thought it might be time to start trying to add some 'own colour' to the objects - so far I have been basically doing highlights to give colour, which is fine for night and dawn/dusk scenes but not for daylight scenes.

And I pretty much failed  :



I guess my next step here is to find some daylight scenes that I like and figure out how the colour schemes work. Should be an interesting challenge!

Thanks all for the comments

As for animating vectors... it's really something I am not comfortable at doing at the moment, nor do I have the software to do it, sadly. Drawing with vectors takes me way too long to consider feasible for making game resources for, and the last time I animated with vectors was in high school! Maybe something to keep in mind for the future, but for now pixels are what I love doing and am comfortable with!

As for refining and adding in more detail (like textures), yep, I definitely plan on learning these things in the future. But for now I am trying to focus on forming shapes in a pleasing manner (I'm only just really now starting to get comfortable with the landscape, my big worry is doing buildings (especially interiors!), so I would rather learn to do a wider range of shapes in a consistent style before I get too focused on the details, because I still have tons to learn here! But thanks for the ideas and the tutorials, I am sure they'll come in handy in the future!

As for now, it's still working with shapes, and I have done my first really serious go at drawing a house, which I think is still pretty bland in shape, but am fairly pleased with when looking at the shading and lighting:



As far as shape goes, it still feels pretty boring, so I guess I'll try drawing my silhouette a bit crazier next .

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 .

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.

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!

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)

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!