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[Ocid]

Hey folks.

Not really sure if this is the right area of the forum to ask this but I didn't quite see where else to put it.

What I'm curious about is how to go about doing hand painted graphics similar to whats seen in Spelunky XBLA, Aquaria or Bastion something along those lines. Are they done at a higher res then scaled down to the resolution the artist is after?

I'm not expecting to be able to achieve the quality seen in those games but i figure while coding is mostly off the menu for me just now I'd try to do start on getting a bit better at doing some art.

Does anyone have any pointers on where to start with this or a link to a tutorial to get me started. My google-fu seems really weak on coming up with anything for this I always seem to end up at tutorials for pixel art which isn't exactly what I'm after. Any help here would be much appreciated.

[pen]

Hello there. Hand-painted graphics are indeed very, very classy.

Resolution-wise you never really have to work with a bigger resolution than what the end result is, though it's often good ( and highly recommended ) to work at twice the size just in case.

A good way to approach hand-painted graphics is to try to think about how to compartmentalize a painting into tiles or shapes (think layers in photoshop). An understanding of how to texture 3d-objects is also helpful.

The best way to go about it, I think, is to first paint a mockup and not think about the technical stuff. Then, when you've done that you can start thinking about how to split things up and experiment.

I recently did some freelance work for Oxeye, an awesome company who's working on a hand-painted action platformer called cobalt. They wanted a desert environment and I was initally tasked with doing some mockups - but since their levels usually are in more urban areas they had no sand dunes and hadn't really used that kind of ground tile before. The logical thing would be to treat each dune as a tile and make variations of it to not make it look boring.

This is NOT one of the fancy mockups, it's just a R&D-test to show what kind of technique I used for the tile.

All the dunes in that image are made from one single tile, though resized and rotated. An important thing to note is that the layer with collisions have some stronger tones painted on them to show where the player can and can't stand (they're not tiles, but could easily be turned into some).

The very first thing you should do though, is to get your hands on aquaria and cobalt since they both have level editors equipped for this kind of thing. Study maps others have made in these games and check what tiles were actually used to create them.


This is another R&D-thing I did for a personal (non)-project:

You'll notice it is very inspired/derived from the way Aquaria handles cliffs.

As far as painting skills goes there are a lot of places and a lot of tutorials out there, but it's kind of hard to link to since what we're talking about is essentially being good at painting in general.
http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm  <<<<< That one is really good though, and covers a lot of topics.

[Ocid]

Hi Pen.

Thanks for the lengthy response.

I don't have access to Cobalt but I do have Aquaria though I've never played around with the level editor. For your personal non-project thing those rocks are gorgeous. What was the R&D for? Was it just to try some techniques or were you looking at importing them into Aquaria to see how they looked in-game?

Also pretty cool to see that one dune landscape was done from a single tile. I'd have though you'd have needed atleast a few.

You do make a good point about this sort of thing being good at painting in general. I suppose my stumbling block at the moment (other than not being much of a painter) is only a very basic knowledge of photoshop and not really knowing about using different brushes or such. I did however stumble across Concept Cookie earlier today. Not had a chance to watch any of their stuff yet but hoping I can pick up some tips on brushes and such.

That android arts tutorial looks fairly extensive. Only took a quick skim before I take a proper look later but thanks, much appreciated for linking that.

[pen]

No problem compadre!

If you have further questions or want help / paintovers / advice, feel free to PM me or add me on skype or msn or something


on brushes: I've got some right here, but you should def. try to stick it out with just round brushes whose opacity is bound to your pen pressure until you feel you've got a grip on things.

Never heard of concept cookie, seems good though. Conceptart.org and cghub.com are excellent if you want to watch wonderful art, if you post there and listen to what people have to say you'll surely improve.