Greyinthedark does backgrounds! [C&C/requests welcome]

[greyinthedark]

Hi there all,

I was originally the programmer for an upcoming novel, but I've now become the background artist as well. This is more than a little terrifying, given that I haven't drawn much for the last five years or so and I was never really all that good at keeping a coherent style in the first place. So, this thread is intended to give me a place to post my practice attempts - more particularly, a place where there are people who know what visual novels should look like.

Any comments or critique are more than welcome, even things along the line of "yes, I can tell that's a cloud, all right". Requests are also fine, though I can't promise that I'll do them well if I do - my skills are somewhat limited and my style can best be described as all-over-the-place!

I've done a few pieces over the last few days as part of this, so I'll post those here in little batches. (Hopefully that's all right - I couldn't find any rules against it.)

[greyinthedark]

A psychedelic ocean! This would be suitable for a VN only if the characters were actually on fire, which is unfortunate.

The school roof photo. Somewhere that I personally have never been, but it seemed like it might be a good thing to try. Maybe suitable for a VN if i took out the sign?

A day at the beach background, suitable for a VN set in Atlantic Canada only. Also, probably not the kind of beach background that would go along with swimsuits, because the water is *not warm*.

[greyinthedark]

Last one of the ones that I've already done! Finished this one early this morning - I'm actually pretty fond of it, creepy as it is, but I feel like it would be more suited for a disney movie or point and click adventure game than for a VN.

[SwedishJazz]

These are definitely a good start! They definitely get the settings/moods across. One thing I noticed, though - all of them are crunchy and pixellated; sorry if I'm being captain obvious and you just saved them as .jpgs because they're practice, but when finishing an asset, it's always a good idea to check it for artifacts or other export hiccups. They can kill the effect of the nicest of artworks.

Keep up the good work!

[greyinthedark]

Thanks for the comment - i'm just glad that you can tell what things are, frankly. Captain Obvious is what I need here, along with his friend Major Problems! I hadn't noticed any pixellation, probably because I'm working on a very small monitor most of the time.

Not sure if it's an artifact of the export or of the fact that these are all speedpaints done at the resolution they're pictured at. Or it could just be something that I'm unintentionally doing myself, as I tend to do an unsharp mask as a final step?

I went back and did a quick export of the roof one in PNG format instead - at my resolution, I can't tell a difference... which is worrying. If possible, could you let me know if you can see a difference? If so, I'll go back and re-export. Might have to dust off photoshop too, since GIMPs PNG exports seem to be huge!

[SwedishJazz]

Yeah, there's a difference! The pixellation in this particular bg is most apparent on the bright teal parts of the clouds - zoom in on both versions really closely and switch between tabs, and you should be able to see the difference even on a small screen. These artifacts generally tend to appear at the edges between colors (here - the clouds, but also where the roof's edges meet the sky, aroudn the "no students allowed" text, so on).

[greyinthedark]

Ah ha! Upon looking closely at the parts you mentioned on another monitor, it was quite obvious (apparently my monitor is also set to be too dark) - and after rummaging around in the background of my exporter, it was apparently compressing things automatically, no matter how often I turned it back up to 100%. Even on the full version some of the artifacts are still there, but I believe that is due to my poor use of sharpening. Thanks so much for your help - working on improving my art skills would do me no good without you pointing this out to me. I'll re-export on full quality and peer at them, and if that doesn't fix it then I'll look for a better png compressor so I don't create enormous files. What programs/settings do you use?

(The other take away from this is that it gave me a reason to track down my cintiq and dig it out of a pile of boxes. Really, when I consider that I've been doing these with a mouse, on a tiny monitor, and in the dark for the last four days, I feel like I probably should focus less on drawing and more on *pausing to think*. Also, I should unpack. And buy a lamp. And buy a real bed so I can get off the air mattress - but that's another problem. )

[SwedishJazz]

I use either Photoshop CS6 or PaintTool Sai, but I'm really no expert when it comes to exporting things - I just use these programs' default settings unless I see something is wrong, and then I fiddle with the Save For Web option in PS.

I'm glad I could help!

[greyinthedark]

And today's background... much sketchier than I want for my eventual style, but I think I pushed it a bit by trying to do buildings plus trees plus fog. Next time, one of these things... or maybe something entirely different. On the plus side, I laid off the unsharp mask and used a different export technique, so hopefully less crunchy! Will be able to check that more tomorrow.

Visual novel verdict: only if using impressionist paintings as sprites

[Drew]

Hi,
I'm struggling with backgrounds so I'm not sure I can add much detailed advice but I notice that in the lower RHS and for the castle the texture of the image looks off? Is there an emboss filter or similar across it?

Maybe for the castle it could benefit from more of a defining paint-over (though not w.r.t detail), the light grey doesn't seem to conform to the lighting in the rest of the scene. It is a reference/paint-over from a photo? There seems to be a lot of detail there in a small area, some more broader strokes to block out and even out the tones could help.

Cheers

-Drew

[greyinthedark]

Hi!

Thanks so much for your feedback, first - it's much appreciated!

It's kind of you to assume that the divergences are due to it being referenced, but sadly no - the odd light and terrible angles are all my own, as are the dodgy hills. The castle is following my basic plan for buildings which is cube+cube + cube lying on its edge - however, I did do this one at twice the size I published it at, so maybe that led to me trying to cram too much details into a small area. It was an attempt to fix some of the quality problems noted earlier, which is maybe always like the spider and the fly song.

The texture comes from my worry always about having things looking too flat, which I think may lead me to up the contrast and saturation too much as well as continue adding details long after I should. I pulled up the version of the castle as it was prior to adding brush strokes for texture and the visible glow - would you say that this one looks better/more in keeping with the rest of the picture, leaving aside the inaccurate light?

And here's the earliest version of the castle - after reading your comment, I think that the color scheme I started with might be a big part of which may point to why it wound up not quite fitting in. You can still see a lot of these colors in the final version, since I did it on one layer. (It was originally supposed to be foggier. Like, super foggy.)

[Drew]

It's kind of you to assume that the divergences are due to it being referenced, but sadly no - the odd light and terrible angles are all my own, as are the dodgy hills. The castle is following my basic plan for buildings which is cube+cube + cube lying on its edge - however, I did do this one at twice the size I published it at, so maybe that led to me trying to cram too much details into a small area. It was an attempt to fix some of the quality problems noted earlier, which is maybe always like the spider and the fly song.

The texture comes from my worry always about having things looking too flat, which I think may lead me to up the contrast and saturation too much as well as continue adding details long after I should. I pulled up the version of the castle as it was prior to adding brush strokes for texture and the visible glow - would you say that this one looks better/more in keeping with the rest of the picture, leaving aside the inaccurate light?

No worries, hope I can give some useful feed back. Ha - Everyone is learning and I don't think your angles have any issues. Perspective looks fine. I suppose the comparing the relative sizes of the castle and the trees, the trees looks off. Given that windows and chimneys are pretty fixed maybe the pines are a bit small (or they're just young trees).

I think working at a larger size then scaling the image down is pretty typical but yeah, it can lead to putting too much detail into the one area. I'm not sure if other people do so but these days to stop myself from slipping into that I try to always work infrom as zoomed out a state as I can, and also only let myself zoom in once I have done all the broad strokes work (rather than finishing an area at a time).

I think that original castle looks better, and the main area with lighting issues is only the LHS battlement and gateway. I think the original fits in a lot more closely to the scene, I'm not sure why I'm not 100% with the newer one, maybe it looks noisier?

And here's the earliest version of the castle - after reading your comment, I think that the color scheme I started with might be a big part of which may point to why it wound up not quite fitting in. You can still see a lot of these colors in the final version, since I did it on one layer. (It was originally supposed to be foggier. Like, super foggy.)

I like that, it depends on how clear you want the castle to be, but having it partially obscured by cloud or haze adds some intrigue. Maybe have think about the overall lighting in the scene then see where on the castle the sun would pick out detail.

If you did go for a foggy scene I guess thinking about how the fog conceals and effects the tone of some areas is worth looking at:
[img width="600" height="480"]https://pixabay.com/static/uploads/phot ... 960_720.jp[/img]

Edit: mmm - not sure why that image won't embed?

[greyinthedark]

Having spent ungodly amounts of time futzing with my castle on a hill, I think I need a break from that. Thanks, Drew! The futzing was much more productive when I had advice to follow rather than just working on things randomly.

Two new images since then:

A seance that may be too successful - came from a random symmetrical swirl

A happy home in the woods, probably the closest I have come so far to the style / time period that I'm actually going to be doing for the VN. Happyish with this, though the night view is very sketchily edited. Building faces and paths outlined in blender - as always, unrealistic lighting all my own.

As always, critiques, comments, or requests welcome!

[greyinthedark]

Another day, another background... another style. I modeled some hexagons for the floor and roof in blender, but went somewhat off-script pretty much immediately. Still, I kind of like this one - I went super dreamy on everything except the gazebo to try and stop myself from adding too much distracting (and incorrect) detail, and I think it suceeded in looking vaguely fairy-tale like in the end.

[greyinthedark]

Took a little break for a couple of days... therefore, a fox!

And then back to the backgrounds - tried for a night scene this time. Overall, I'm alright with it... but it's still too sketchy for a VN background, I suspect. Also, that road, man. Too dark and it looked like the grand canyon, too light and it looked like a river. Next time, I'll do it paved and put a car on it - I hate drawing cars, but it'll be worth it.