So recently I entered BG Blitz and since I don't make many backgrounds I thought I would see if I can gather advice from the wise and wonderful ags community on my entry.
Here is a list of things I have done:
1) Sketched and scanned in my background.
2) Used photoshop to colour my background.
3) Used "effects" such as transparency and gradients for shading.
4) Resized the background and added detail with GraphicsGale.
Is there any YAYs or NAYs in my system? Is there anything you think is dead fugly and I should change?
What I was thinking when I was making this was the Roadrunner landscapes and backgrounds.
Sketch:
(http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/bgsketchnov09.png)
Coloured and shading:
(http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/huh_copy.png)
Shrunk and added detail:
(http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/bgblitzibnov09.png)x2
Any advice would be really grateful. Hopefully I'll force myself to do a few more of these.
Hi,
I must say the linework of the pencil sketch appeals to me much more than the two others. I also feel that the background doesn't gain anything by being low res. If you could produce a version of the middle image with anti-aliasing it would be better preferable to the third. I feel that the colours you've chosen are a little bit muddy and some of the dynamism of the sketch is lost.
I also love the roadrunner backgrounds. It's one of the influences for the background style of Nelly Cootalot, and I've been thinking a lot about it developing a background style for Nelly II. This blog (which I learned about on these forums) is a great resource for scanned animation backgrounds:
http://animationbackgrounds.blogspot.com/search/label/ROAD%20RUNNER%20AND%20COYOTE
Notice that they use a mixture of linework and blocks of flat colour which are not always perfectly aligned. Why not take your original sketch and produce some cleaner linework, then start to experiment with colour palettes.
Overall, I like this and I look forward to more!
Ali knows his stuff, a mix of your line art and high res colouring would look nicer. The image looses depth with the 320 version.
Thanks for your comments guys! And for the link Ali!
So I've decided to redo the background in more of the road runner kind of style:
(http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/redo_copy.png)
Kind of rough, but on the right track?
Maybe make some colors less saturated and add textures (make it dirtier).
Though I don't know if that has much to do with what you were doing before. The style is really up to you, but I'd keep more to grayer, blue and brown colours if you're going with postapocalyptic feel. The fisrt bg looks like it just survived a terminator attack but the latest looks like it's showing a bright sunny day in utopia.
But it's a WIP, so I might change my opinion.
I really enjoyed the 'draftmanship' of the first drawing..with all the extra lines and slight scrawl. But then as others have said, it depends on the style you're after.