Hello all, this isn't a stand alone tutorial. Read the first tutorial on High-Res background drawing and then this one because they are almost identical except for a few certain... um... things... ok, what ever i don't know what to write here and i should be doing my Propaganda Art mid term essay but i'm doing this, so let's get on with it.

Take the backround sketch and copy it to clipboard. Then open a new blank image and size it to 320x200.


here is the image pasted because the image is
larger than 320x200, it won't fit on the canvas

Paste the backround sketch in and choose edit | transform | scale or CTRL T for free transform.


look at me! i'm scaling!

While holding SHIFT make the image as small as possible, shift will keep the aspect ratio of the image while resizing so that you can't accidentaly squash it or stretch it. Then drag the image around and resize it until it fits inside the 320x200 image. This doesn't work as well with this image because I had intended this to be a scrolling room, so there will be a large portion of the screen where there is no sketch, so I would suggest when sketching your rooms on paper, either do them at 3.2 inches by 2 inches or 6.4 inches by 4 inches, this way you either won't have to scale, or you'll be able to scale it exactly to your 320x200 image, make sense?


scaled to fit the canvas

So when the sketch is where you'd like it to be, hit enter and that is where it shall remain. So now, basically, we go about what was covered in the earlier tutorial, outlining the image and colouring it in. But this time, I suggest using a line weight of 1 and nothing higher, because when this is shown on screen the pixels will be a little bigger and may make the picture look bad. Also, since this is a tutorial for 320x200 aliased backrounds, remeber to turn Anti-Alias off on all tools you use and to use the pencil tool for the outlining. And with that in mind, I begin...
As I was tracing, I noticed that it's harder to get the pixels to do what you want in some situations, like with small detail especially, I found myself doing a lot of erasing and retouching before things like the lens looked good enough for me. I would also suggest, instead of using the lasso tool to cut away areas of light and dark, to just use the pencil tool and outline an area of light or dark and then fill it in after. It's easier to control the pixels that way I feel. The lasso tool can't be trusted with working this small.

So this is about as done as it's gonna get. I tried a new style of clouds, I don't know how I feel about it yet. [this is where eric points out all the problems with the drawing so that no one can tell him later, cause he already knows] I know I messed up on the lighting a bit but I still think it looks fairly decent. I went pretty quickly on this one so I left off the door and the window in the second small tower and all the detail in the moon also I didn't put as much detail into the cliff face as I would if this were a backround I was seriously working on. Also, there is a large wide open space of nothing in the upper right sky... That just comes from poor planning and I have no clue what to put in there, so it stays empty, but I think you get the idea.

I hope this helped a little bit. I personally enjoy sketching on paper and then transfering it to the computer, my mind just works better on paper sometimes than it does on the screen. If anyone has any questions or a suggestion for a way to do this better or even a tutorial they'd like to see, email me please.
And that's the end of that chapter - home