Hi all! I'm new here, and this is my first post. I'm the artist behind Cinders and Solstice. Tom asked to me to come here and share some info about the process, so here I am. First of all - thanks so much for all the nice comments! It really made my day :)
Here's a picture explaining some steps and iterations:
Here's a gif animation, showing a few screens from the process:
Click on all pictures to open them in new window, these are just thumbs. They're quite big, and I didn't want to spam the forums on my first day ;)
As for general process - Tom summed it up pretty well. We do use shortcuts sometimes. For example if I painted one lantern that will suit some locations - I will simply re-use it, repainting it a bit so it fits other places. Same thing goes for other details, especially foliage. Although I do not like to directly use photos in my work. That means most things are painted from scratch. That said - I do use a lot of textures. Pretty random. They give more depth, and painting on them makes the detail look more interesting.
For example - in Panorama's case I took the first draft and placed lots of random textures on it in Overlay, Soft Light or Multiply mode (depending on the texture). They were pretty random things, like a texture of stones, wall, grass, wood. The idea is that they will add some randomness to the whole thing, not that they will actually show its detail. I just like to have a textured underpainting, so the detail painted on top will "pop" more. Hope that makes some sense ;)
Also, sometimes, when in a hurry, I will take a bunch of random photos, blur them, mix them together and paint something on top of them to get the first "shape" of the location. See the Workshop here:
This is *not* my favourite location, but I'm showing it just to give you the idea how to use the photo without making it look like a photo and creating a background that looks out of place. In this case I took 2 or 3 photos of random "workshops" I found on Google, blended them, painted a lot on top of them to get the general structure. Then I set the whole scene - added first plane items (the wall, and a pipe taken from another Solstice's location). What I got (picture at the bottom) looks sort of random, but thanks to the photo I already had the proportions right and knew characters will look okay there (I keep a layer with characters in every file, just to see how they blend with the background). And then I simply painted on top of it and coloured it. This definitely makes the whole process much quicker, and it's still painted, not photo-manipulated.
Sometimes, as Tom said, we use some 3D. Although it's rare, we often find it looks too "plastic". Not the best word to describe it, but you'll see what I mean. The Bathhouse will be a good example, also showing how we use textures:
In this case my boyfriend, who wanted to practice some 3D, did a quick render, based on my quick sketch. As you can see my original concept was quite different. The perspective was off and clumsy, but it showed the mood we were aiming for. But as you can see - the render, even though correct, feels a bit too.. fake. And clean. Hence it only served as an underpainting. The final location only uses the proportions of the render, everything else is handpainted. As for textures - I used some of my own for details (the fountain, pot), but they are also heavily overpainted. I take photos of interesting details everywhere, so I can use them in my work for small things, like here. So the bits on the fountain come from a cheap plate found in Morocco, while the pink flowers in the pot are from my Mom's bouqet. That said - if you'd see original photos you wouldn't recognize them, as I said - I always overpaint such small details so they fit the scene better. Usually to the point that they end up looking completely different.
As for other companies, especially the ones making HOPA games, I know for a fact it varies. I did art for at least 3 or 4 games in this genre, and it always depends on the company. Some use renders and don't even overpaint them much. Some, as it's been already mentioned, do photomanipulations - most of them actually. Some paint things from scratch, with just some texture here and there, and those look the best in my opinion (for example Drawn games). But in the end, as Jason said, the final effect counts. The problem is many artists don't really take the effort to polish the whole scene, and it often shows. It's one thing to just use a bunch of photos together, the real effort comes when you have to paint a scene out of it. So, nothing bad in using photos in general, but it's the actual painting that makes it look good or not in the end in my opinion.
ktalkimist - the background you have posted looks absolutely awesome! Photo or not, it doesn't matter, because it just looks stylised and painterly. As for the consistency, I think if you'll keep the same style for the characters and the same for backgrounds, even though the two are different, you'll still have a great looking game. As Tom said - there is also power in inconsistent style.. if it's done consistently.. Okay, that sounded weird perhaps, but I hope you know what I mean ;) Basically it would look bad if you had one photo background, one painted, and one anime character, a second one a bit more realistic etc. That would look off. In this case it just looks consequent and also pretty. So, it works great :)
Oookay, so this turned out to be a long post. Hope you found it useful! And feel free to ask if you have any questions :)
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Awesome stuff, thanks!
. Somehow, people assume a dude and a girl can't be just good friends and partners in crime. To make things more confusing, my actual girlfriend is a part of MoaCube too, and works with me on 
