Alrighty, for this part of the tut I'm going to be using an image Shawn Guzzo drew. Here is the image.

Now he didn't ask me for help, as you can see he doesn't need any, but I wanted to try doing the ground and I had an idea for it anyways so here it is in tutorial form.

The image is pretty much almost done except for one very large part... The ground. The idea I had for the ground is cobblestones. Lots and lots of little stones... Now, how can we do this?

Well we could draw each stone individually and then shade it... Then we could go mad. Or we could define a pattern and use that to work off of.

So let's do that. First we have to see how big of a pattern to make. Let's make a new image 25 pixels by 25 pixels. In this image let's take a grey from the building and make it the background, then let's make a lighter grey and define some stones:

And there we have it but we are far from done. Now we have to make it so that can be tiled. So go to Filter, Other, Offset. Since this background is 25x25, I set the fields to about half of that:

This is the image I now have.

See what offset does is take the image and scroll it horizontally and vertically a certain number of pixels, with wrap around turned on it takes the pixels that fall off the edge of the image and puts them on the other side. So this way we can see what the image would look like if tiled. Make any sense?

before offset

after offset

So now we have to make that image nice and tileable. see the straight lines that run up and down the image of the stones?

We have to smooth those out and fit the rocks together nicely. So just add some pixels to them and let's see what happens when we offset it again.

Now the offset:

Looks fine to me, now select the entire thing and go to Edit, Define Pattern. Perfect, now I go back to the image that Shawn drew and select the ground. Then with the paint bucket tool I go to the paintbucket options and change contents to Pattern:

Like so. Then I fill in the selected area.

WHAMMO! Stones!

What you think they look like crap? Well I agree. Just give me a second, will ya? I think the first think I'm going to do is tone down the grey in the stones, which I did here...

Now I'm going to select the stones area again and on a new layer do a radial gradient from grey to black:

Then change that layer's blending to Multiply.

Ok, still we are far far far from done. Bare with me. First I lighten the gradient's opacity to 72%, this number is just what I felt looked good, not a standard at all.

Collapse both the stones and the gradient layers and then copy and paste it into a new image. Just like last time change the image to use indexed colours and set the amount of colours to about... I dunno, 10.

Here is what I ended up with:

detail

We still aren't done. We have to add the highlights to the stones so they look like they are a part of the world. So to do that I'm going to use the paint brush [which is the first time I've ever used it in a background or character or anything for a game] and with the opacity set low, draw high lights from the lamp post.

Then I'm going to add some light blue areas to the other side of the stones on the far left and right.

There we go, just a few more corrections and then I'm ready to reduce the colours on the ground again. To reduce the colours on the ground I'm going to collapse all the ground layers so that the ground and the highlights are all together, then copy and paste it into a new image just like before, change the colours to indexed.

Now, since I know there are 10 colours in the original ground I have to add to those ten the colours of the yellows and blues, I'm just going to zoom in and try some numbers till I find one I like.

I was happy with 35.

And that's that. 182 colours for that. 35 of which are in the ground. I don't think I did that bad a job and it was quite easy as this tutorial hopefully shows you.

So yea, I hope this helped with anything, until next time.

eric

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