Nosterion's bacground arts: transforming real life photos into VN bacground.

[Nosterion]

Hi Guys,

Instead of writing a little novel here, let me jump into the middle.

Main points:

• I love visual novels.

• I love digital arts.

• I love photography.

• I have zero talent for drawing, maybe less.

So, taking the above into account, I decided to transform my real life pictures into digital arts.
After experimenting a bit, I went with colored pencil transformation and oil painting transformation.
I have a website in the making on which you can vote on your preferred style, but finishing it will take some time, and I just wanted to feel the excitement of sharing and receiving feedback as soon as possible. (Yeah, I know, patiance is not my strong suit. Beside, coding both the frontend and backend side of the webpage is a bit of a challange for me right now. But I'll get there eventually.)

So, here comes a few early example in sets of three. The first one is the original picture, the second one is made with colored pencil, and the third is oil painting. I would love to hear the community's opinion about which style would fit a visual novel more as a background art. Naturally the style would effect the character design too, so it is important to establish the base style as soon as possible.
Please keep in mind that these are early designs and I will keep improving making them. Also, the originals are 2000 px+ wide, I reduced their size to comply rules here.

[YaminoOkami]

I think they still look a bit too realistic/photograph-like to fit nicely with digital art drawn characters (Unless characters too would be super realistic).

I don't know much about transforming real life photos into digital art so I can't offer you much of advice, but I did try playing a bit with one of your photos:





I think you should go for at least this much for photos to nicely fit the characters.

[Nosterion]

I think they still look a bit too realistic/photograph-like to fit nicely with digital art drawn characters (Unless characters too would be super realistic).

I don't know much about transforming real life photos into digital art so I can't offer you much of advice, but I did try playing a bit with one of your photos:





I think you should go for at least this much for photos to nicely fit the characters.

Thank you for the honest critique. I too, had a feeling that they don't really fit the usual visual novel character style. I was thinking about something of a meshup between anime and painting style. At least it would be original. I even found a few artists whose character designs would fit perfectly with the oil paintings. But I am painfully aware that I need to keep working on my skills. I made a few new pictures though, they are also available on my deviantart page. https://www.deviantart.com/nosterion

But they are still too lifelike....hmm...
Maybe I should switch from Corel Painter to Photoshop.
What software did you use for your sample?

[YaminoOkami]

Thank you for the honest critique. I too, had a feeling that they don't really fit the usual visual novel character style. I was thinking about something of a meshup between anime and painting style. At least it would be original. I even found a few artists whose character designs would fit perfectly with the oil paintings. But I am painfully aware that I need to keep working on my skills. I made a few new pictures though, they are also available on my deviantart page. https://www.deviantart.com/nosterion

But they are still too lifelike....hmm...
Maybe I should switch from Corel Painter to Photoshop.
What software did you use for your sample?

I used this online photo editor witch was specifically designed for transforming photos to artwork:
https://www.befunky.com/create/

It's seems pretty easy to use considering this was the first time I used it or tried doing something like this and I didn't get a terrible results. True I doubt it has as many options as Photoshop (Of course true you could always use both).

I usually only use Krita and while it is a great program for drawing I don't think it's very suited for what you are doing.

[Nosterion]

Thank you for the honest critique. I too, had a feeling that they don't really fit the usual visual novel character style. I was thinking about something of a meshup between anime and painting style. At least it would be original. I even found a few artists whose character designs would fit perfectly with the oil paintings. But I am painfully aware that I need to keep working on my skills. I made a few new pictures though, they are also available on my deviantart page. https://www.deviantart.com/nosterion

But they are still too lifelike....hmm...
Maybe I should switch from Corel Painter to Photoshop.
What software did you use for your sample?

I used this online photo editor witch was specifically designed for transforming photos to artwork:
https://www.befunky.com/create/

It's seems pretty easy to use considering this was the first time I used it or tried doing something like this and I didn't get a terrible results. True I doubt it has as many options as Photoshop (Of course true you could always use both).

I usually only use Krita and while it is a great program for drawing I don't think it's very suited for what you are doing.

Wow, Man! You showing me that site will certainly cause me a few sleepless nights.
I instantly fell in love with the graphic novel transformation settings of that site. I played around a bit with a few pictures. What do you think?

[YaminoOkami]

Wow, Man! You showing me that site will certainly cause me a few sleepless nights.
I instantly fell in love with the graphic novel transformation settings of that site. I played around a bit with a few pictures. What do you think?

While they could still use some work, I think they certainly look a lot better/more painting like now.
I especially like the first one, true if it was me I would lower transformation % on trees on top left.
Oppositely in 3rd one I would increase transformation on tamale only since one colored buildings seem to need higher transformation to look just as paint like as the rest of the photo, while the parts with a lot of small details need lower % so they don't get too blury.

Here I did a quick job of this to show you the difference.




I didn't see an option to transform just a part of a photo in that site but you can still do that by doing two versions of the same photo and then cropping/pasting the parts that you want different level of transformation for (True I did it pretty quickly so I didn't fit parts the best and you can still see a bit of disorder where I cut if you look at it, sorry a bit short on time at a moment as I am behind a schedule with my own VN project ).

But all in all, with some more work I think you can get what you want and are on a nice track. It's not far from something witch would decently fit digital art characters, especially if you find artist for character with a matching style.

[Nosterion]

I kinda feel like I leveled up.
Below are a few examples of the new images.
Thank you YaminoOkami for the guidence and showing me that awesome webpage. I practiced a lot and now I more or less get the hang of it.

[Nosterion]

And here is a few new ones with different scenery.

[Nosterion]

Just a few new, more refined ones.

[alberte]

Hi, I see your trying to turn photos into backgrounds for a visual nove, cool.
Here's my attempt to turn a photo of yours into a drawing-like image BG for a visual novel

[Nosterion]

Hi, I see your trying to turn photos into backgrounds for a visual nove, cool.
Here's my attempt to turn a photo of yours into a drawing-like image BG for a visual novel

Hi Alberte,

Thank you for your effort playing around with one of my pictures.
It looks good on small screen and I think it fits visual novels. Although on bigger screens I think it is a bit too blurred/pixelated.
Currently I face the same, but reversed problem. Looking at it on big screen or zooming in makes my transformed photos fitting for certain style of visual novels I think (at least my latest attempts do), but if you look at them on small screen, they are still a bit too lifelike.
Maybe we can find some middle ground for them with practice.

Have a nice day!
Cheers

[Nosterion]

UPDATE

Just updating this post, because I think I was able to improve a lot since I started this thread.
I realize that my pictures still only fit into a very niche category when it comes to visual novels, but I haven't given up hope that with the right team we can create something unique and worth the effort. Besides, one never stops improving and learning new things.

So here comes a few of my latest works in 1920 x 1200 px resolution.