| Easy as pie... |
| Alrighty, so let's draw
a quick background.
I open up
a background that I made before so this way I have all the
colours I need. Then, I choose the colour of the ground outline
and then the lasso tool and draw a quick line with it.
Then I flood
fill it. For me it's cntrl-del, but you can just switch to
the paintbucket [k] and click.
Then, I go
to the selection menu and in modify, I choose Contract, and
set the field to 1 and then hit delete. This clears everything
but the outline.
Now fill this
area in with the light sand colour and make a new layer.
|
| Alrighty
then. Now on the new layer we are going to draw some sand
dunes. I'm going to do them the same exact way I drew the
ground, with the lasso.
Then follow
the same steps, fill it in brown, contract by 1, erase the
insides, and fill it with the sand colour.
Bop, we just
started and we're almost done. Now I'm going to drag the sky
layer in behind everything on it's own layer...
|
Now for the shadow. I'm
going to make a new layer then select all the areas where
there is sand, not the outline, just the filled colour.
With these selected [magic wand of course, no AA and using
all layers] I'm then going to fill the selections in on
the new layer with the dark sand colour that I plucked off
my older drawing.
|
| Now, with the lasso
tool again, I select the areas that I feel the light would
be hitting, which is the tops of the sand
dunes and some areas on the ground.
I don't have good feelings
about how this will turn out... But I shall continue anyway,
I'm usually always surprised with the shading. So here I have
one part selected. Now I just go back and deselect the parts
of the ground that are selected. I'm only concerned with the
dunes at the moment.
Now hit delete and get
rid of the selected colour... The light should shine through.
I don't think it looks so bad. Now the ground...
Same thing, deselect the
colour you want to stay and then hit delete. The colour I
want to stay is anything in the dunes, so deselect everything
there till it's just ground.
Then hit delete...
Whiz-Bang, a [simple but
effective] background. |
Now for the other little
eric bits. This really only applies to trying to emulate
me, and I hope you don't want to do that for the rest of
your life, there are much better styles out there for you
to use than mine.
I think the one thing
people most notice is the little textures I put in the ground.
I don't know if they work when it comes to being artistically
interesting but I like to do them anyways. So here is how
I do them...
|
| The first thing I need
to do to this background is give myself more dark... So I'm
going to encircle it at the bottom, like so:
Now, with
that darkness I just quickly draw lines in the ground with
the lasso and then fill them in, starting with the dark sand
first...
This is just
random really, I have no plan when I do this. It just comes
down to luck if it looks good on the first try... Which it
usually doesn't. But that's ok, it's on it's own layer we
can easily fix it. So, fill these selections in with the dark
sand...
And we have
this, not too bad. I think that helps you get an idea of what
I do. Actually, if you look at the background, the upper right
corner is very boring looking. It needs something, so I would
prolly put a mountain back there using another set of colours.
So let's do that, taking the colours from this background:
And on a new
layer behind all the sand layers, we draw a quick mountain
the same way everything else was drawn. I think it would be
a good idea to over lap the little bit of sky circle so that
it pushes it to the background and people can't be confused
as to what the foreground and background and sky is. Like
this:
It looks alright
I guess, but there is one more thing that I want to change
cause I'm anal... This area:
I want to
clean this line up... Like this...
I think we
are done now, I'd just save it as a gif and then upload it
to sylpher, but you can skip these steps quite easily.
12 colours,
not bad. |
| Help at all?
eric
home |
