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[Koobazaur]

Hey guys, so I'm working on a simple side-scrolling city scene and struggling with the art. I've done an art test using Kenny's free tiles and going after a Blade Runner esque feel but not quite nailing it.


(Click for Bigger)

I know I lack all the Asian stuff but I don't want that. I also don't have the glowy banners (yet), but even with how its looking, I'm not sure that would solve it. I focused on lots of different colors and bloom in a night scene but it doesn't feel right. What am I missing?

[Muffinhat]

Pay attention to the color palette on your reference, as I think the place you may be stumbling is in the lack of color intensity. Notice how bold and vibrant the colors get, and how stark the contrast is in the value. In comparison, it sort of makes your image look.... washed out in a way.

I went ahead and messed around with the image by adding saturation and moving around the brightness and contrast sliders. It's kinda rushed, but it may give you an idea on where to take it from here.

[JWK5]

[Muffinhat]

JWK5 provides best critique/extremely elaborated tutorial.

[Cobralad]

brick and mortar does not exactly spells "blade runner" and i doubt you can just magic it up with overlay color.

[JWK5]

A lot of the ground-level scenery in Bladerunner is brick and mortar (which helps gives the scenes taking place there that gritty noir feel and contrasts with the tecno-architecture above), but yeah I wouldn't go with just modding that sprite set. To get a general color scheme down or try to get a certain feel going (as the OP was doing) its not such a bad thing but for something more finalized I agree the tiles themselves don't really suit the setting the OP has in mind (I was't sure if the OP was actually going to use the set or was just using it as a testing ground).

That said, I don't just want to leave the OP hanging. I don't have a lot of time (as is I am typing this whilst making breakfast and I've not yet had my morning caffeine fix) but I did squeeze in 5 minutes to whip the following together (I tried to keep it somewhere between a screenshot of Bladrunner and the tile set shot I modded earlier in the thread). I did it in MS Paint and dropped in some glow via GIMP but it might give the OP an idea of how to start (you can even feel free to cut it up and mod it into tiles if you want). It's obviously cramped (and sloppy as shit) but the point is you can get something up pretty quickly just starting with some base shapes and colors.

[Koobazaur]

Holy, JWK5 thanks for such detailed feedback! This is plenty useful to me and you make all good points Looking at the small thumbs in my OP you're right the references have a much more refined/limited color palette, whereas mine is kind of all over the place. As for Bricks, the original Shadowrun on the NES featured plenty of that and while it lacked the neon glow, it was still a nice dystopian setting to reference too.

And that it took you only 5 minutes to whip that up flabbergasts me as non-artist. But that's why I always hired people who know what they're doing on my bigger projects :p my original art test took me like 4 hours to make (But half of that was just researching and messing with tiles in Tiled)