So, here is a little development of a background by our artist, Fizzii - she started her work on this screen based off of a SteveSketch™, so you can see how our wonderful artists take my scribbles, and produce a work of art out of them.
So - here is a screen that is in the "South Woods" section of the Valley. The South woods is below Volksville, and it is bordered by rivers, mountains and the ocean at the south. This screen is where the woods start to meet the beaches of Lonaria.
Now, Jeremy and I had discussed the look of the area - and he'd done several other fully completed sketches for these areas, except for this last one. By the time Fizzii had gotten here, she'd already had several other similar areas completed, so she had a good handle on the design and art style of the area. So I drew up a simple SteveSketch™. She took it from there.
About Fizzii's sketch, based off the SteveSketch™
I base the sketch off whatever is existing already. For instance, the room to the right has a bit of an extra ridge above the main cliff face, so I have copied that feature. To make a woods area seem more woody, there needs to be a variety of trees - not just foreground trees, but trees placed towards the background. The other trick to making landscapes more natural is to place trees and bushes etc in clusters. Too often people try to place things randomly, and in doing so they end up placing everything perfectly evenly, with same sized gaps between objects, and defeat the actual intent they set out to have. True randomness involves clusters, various areas which are more empty than others.
For now the sketch is very rough, so things will be moved around as it fits the background.
About the first colouring
The sketch forms the base layer in Photoshop. To block some colours in, but retain the lines, I make a new layer, and change the Layer's setting to Multiply. This multiplies your colours over the base black and white layer, and even shades of grey are retained. It is possible to have all the detail defined in the base black and white (and gray scale) layer, and simply use multiply on top of that, though I don't use that technique.
Next
Because I'm very lazy, I often copy segments from other backgrounds and use that for part of the detailing. To merge it all in, I go over with a 1 px brush. This is a very rough version and will need some more tidy up as we go along.
Next:
In a new layer, I brush over the trees to define them a bit better and also cover over all that black I had used in the messy sketch. This is done with a three pixel hard round brush. Shadows aren't done properly (e.g. shadows from the canopy or from other branches or other trees) yet, neither is the shadowed colours properly set - this will be refined later.
Next
Some very quick work to the foreground rocks. Again, I've cut out some rocks from another background, and then painted to merge it in. While it is taking shortcuts, it also does help to maintain some consistency between screens.
So, there's the first installment! More will be up soon as she works on the background!
Bt
