Background Art (introduction)

At long last, We are going to break away from the sprites and explore the other major realm of pixel art for game related purposes. In this installment we are going to create a full-fledged background from start to finish, breaking our picture into bits and peices to examine every detail of our creation. There are alot of new concepts and techniques that we will need to explore in order to help our environments flourish. Before we begin i would just like to point out the similarities between pixelling environments and painting them or coloring them with a dry medium. When we explored sprites, the main empasis which shaped our pixels into fighting champion sprites was the anatomy and line art of that sprite. This time around we have two new forces to deal with, and without further ado i introduce "composition" and "color"! These two elements are going to be the very backone of any background that you do. It is our composition that is going to "wow" the onlooking crowd, and it is our use of color that will bring it alive. We will talk about composition a little later, but for now i want to say a thing or two about color usage for backgrounds in general.

It was two years ago that my painting professor at college spoke these words to me, "It is rare to find an object in nature who's color is of pure intensity...". Of course there was alot that followed that which i probably should have listened to, but i thought the guy was too insane for his own good (very eccentric person) so i declined to pay further attention. It was only later when i saw him painting this huge masterpeice, in awe of his masterful color usage did i start to take what this man said to heart. Of course at that point i had painted a few stills of my own, and they turned out ok, but I realized then how important color was to any painting. I looked at my classmates paint and noticed how they would use the blue's and red's straight from the tube to paint their environments. They always had this fake, sort of 'commercial coloring' look to them that you might find on a poster. I noticed when my professor painted, he was always mixing in browns, olive greens, and 'ochre' (or "ocre" ive also seen it spelled, heh). At first it seems pretty silly to be mixing in browns with his blues and other brilliant colors, but he did this for 2 very important purposes. First, he was creating a very specific atmosphere, which is something thats unique to any painting or artwork, but more interestingly, those browns, dull greens and ochre always sapped alot of the color intensity out of the commercial made colors, making them much more "natural" looking. Long boring story to bring about a simple point (sorry I suppose i could have condensed this, but im an elaborative typer), Most colors in nature are only mid intensity at best.

To prove this point, our professor made us take a look at an apple and an orange. He argued that these two items seemed to have some of the most brilliant colors found in nature (lightsources dont count :P ). He then stuck the fruit next to a color swatch of both red and orange, with full intensity (very 'factory'ish looking colors indeed, almost blinding). The apple and orange couldnt really compare to the brilliance of the swatches. Whenever I feel i am having troubles picking out the right types of 'shades' of color, i always think back to this simple comparison.

The first image shows a full on intense red color selection while the second image shows what the deepest red color of an apple would look like if you were to use your color grab tool in your favorite paint program.

I dont know how many times i look at someones grass tile and am overtaken by the blindingly bright greens used by the artist. (if i ever do an indepth grass tutorial im sure this very statement will pop up again someday). What we want to do is break away from the "factory color" mentality that we are all used to and have all come accustomed to while making sprites, or other colorful pixel illustrations. So, as im sure you get the point by now, we want to stay away from insanely intense or artificial looking colors.

Now on to more exciting stuff. Let us start to talk about composition of our image, and get a basic example started. If youve ever taken any art course, whether it be in highschool or college or kindergarten or wherever, 9 times out of 10 youre going to hear the word "composition" within the first day, heh. (or at least within the first week). Basically composotion is how we portray the image to make it look interesting to the viewer. A good example of a great use of composition would be the movie "The Matrix" (thinking of a more contemporary example than, lets say Dahli, let alone the countless other masters before his time). If you can recall back to the movie "the matrix" and think of the scene on the rooftop right after Neo dodges all those bullets the agent shot at him, and then Neo says something like, "Trinity...help!" and the agent says "Only human...." and then you see Trinity pointing the gun straight at the camera (and proceeds to say "Dodge this"). Now imagine that freezeframe of Trinity pointing the gun at the camera. It sort of gives a very deep perspective view of her arm and the gun chamber, and the whole 'foreshortening' effect going on there, and then her head seems rather distant in the background as her body is poised ready to fire. What makes this camera shot so different from any regular "gun to head" film shot is the fact that the camera films it at such an extreme angle. Theres alot of 'action' going on in that freeze frame shot, just indicated by Trinity's body language and the odd perspective of her and the gun. Interestingly enough, that very shot was story boarded before it was filmed, and they placed the camera to film the shot so it would mimick the perspective that was drawn in the storyboard image. Meaning that they put the camera there on purpose to capture that bazaare, yet interesting perspective. Now not every composition has to be as 'actiony' as that example, it really depends on what type of mood you are trying to set. I just wanted to get across the difference between the standard "sideview of someone shooting" and the "camera staring down the barrel of the gun" perspectives, because it very much applies to the sort of compositional decisions we will want to conciously think about when we block out our backgrounds.Trinity holding gun to agents head with city skyline in background.