[Feedback] Background help

[Zanorin]

Hey all,
As a person who sucks at backgrounds, I'd like some feedback on this:

Is there anything horribly wrong with it ? How could I improve the water puddle ?
Also, I realize the brick pattern on the wall should follow the wall's perspective, but I have no clue how to do so...

Thanks in advance

[TEETH]

That water puddle is is pretty good and very easy to read. Since your background is the same sort of hue and shade of purple as the pokemon, the pokemon doesnt stand out as well as it could. Making it darker (since I think it;s supposed to be at night?) And adding another reflection on the pokemons body because of the lamp its holding would really set the scene better. As an idea, you could make the background mostly black/dark purple, and then have reflective highlights for things like the bricks, sidewalks, and roadways.

[eishiya]

To put the bricks in perspective, just stagger what you've drawn so that the horizontal lines have about the same (or slightly lesser) slope as the line where the wall meets the pavement. You probably only need to stagger the bottom set, the top set seems to be close to the horizon and thus should have horizontal lines.

In the reflection, the Gengar seems to be standing on the very edge of the pavement rather than a little bit away from the edge. To communicate this, just hide the lower 1-2 pixels of the feet behind the pavement. We should probably also see more of the underside of the body.

Here's an edit changing the reflections and bricks. On the right, I also hue-shifted the colours more to make them look more interesting. The lamp emits a warm, yellow-orange light, the complement of purple. If you let that light colour the parts it lights instead of just making them a lighter purple, I think that'll help the colour scheme a lot, as well as make a more eye-catching composition. I made the highlights slightly more orange in my edit, but you could take this further and make it look better.



It took me a few looks to figure out the story in the scene. I think making the lollipop larger and giving it bigger chunk missing would help it read better.
Also, don't forget that the lollipop is affected by the same lights as the rest of the scene! It should not be so perfectly white and red.

[Zanorin]

Okay, so considering the fact that TEETH thought the lollipop was a lantern and eishiya's comment I deduced the lollipop was not readable enough xD I wanted it to be seen from the 3/4 - side, but I guess making it face the viewer will make it easier to read. I also made it bigger !
I made both brick patterns slightly sloped, looked weird if I did it on only one of the two sets of bricks.
@eishiya I hope you don't mind, I used your color palette because I really liked the greenish tone of the puddle's main color, and the yellowish highlights were what I had tried to come up with in the beginning but failed miserably :')
How'd I go ?

[MysteryMeat]

oh, huh. I'd read it as a white rose!

I do like the reflection though, it's quite well done. Something you might want to poke at a bit is the road, though! Try adding things like faded tire marks or loose bits of pavement to give it a slight bit of texture. You can achieve this with a lot less work than the wall, try to operate off "less is more" so you don't disturb the clarity of the puddle!

[Zanorin]

oh, huh. I'd read it as a white rose!

That bad eh ? I tried fixing it a little more, does it look like a lollipop yet ? ;_;

I also tried doing something about the ground, tried two different approaches even though I'm not quite satisfied with either of them... What d'you think ?

[MysteryMeat]

Haha no I meant in the original picture it looks like that, it looks great now. Fantastic work with the street in that first version, you may not feel confident about it but coming from an outside perspective it looks fine to me!

I'd say you just need to fill out that empty background space and youre golden

[eishiya]

I think if the pavement in the background is made more horizontal (or at least not steeper than the foreground pavement), it'll look great As-is, it's got a completely different horizon from the foreground pavement.

[Zanorin]

Hey again,

Thank you guys for your advice ! in the end I went with the pavement kind of ground pattern, and I tried to make it more horizontal.
About the empty background space, I tried doing some kind of sewer drain, but I'm not sure about it, any opinions ?

[eishiya]

The grate is a bit distracting. I don't think you need anything back there, really.

I think you misunderstood what I meant about the pavement being more horizontal, I meant the one in the background.

[Zanorin]

You mean this one ? I don't really see how it is steeper than the foreground pavement though 

[eishiya]

Yeah, that's the one. And it's steeper:

It looks even steeper than it is to me though, because it should be at a lower angle, since it's closer to the imaginary horizon line (because it's higher than the foreground pavement, and the horizon is above all the pavement).

[Melodee]

sry for interfering but i thought it was a lolipop the first time XDD

i think it looks better now though.

[Zanorin]

@Melodee thank for the feedback

@eishiya I think you misinterpreted the image there, here's a top-down perspective:


If that was not clear, how could I make it more so ? :/

[eishiya]

I interpreted it correctly, the complaint I'm making is that the sidewalk in the background doesn't fit the perspective of the foreground areas.

[jaideliete]

If I may suggest a couple of things for your consideration:



First, that the sidewalk corner could be extended further. As it is, the sidewalk doesn't wrap around the building, even though you want to suggest a street there (Which isn't impossible, but looks unusual).

And then, regarding the aforementioned perspective... the lines that run perpendicular to the lines of your sidewalk & building should all be running off to the same vanishing point. I've drawn a line through your puddle that indicates the perspective THAT gives, and then drawn in a couple more lines that would all roughly meet at the same point. You absolutely don't need to use that as your vanishing point to draw perpendicular lines, you can pick anything you'd like! But you'll want everything in that scene to share the same perspective, which may cause you to reconsider things like the shape of the puddle, or the lamp, or the layout of the background.

Hopefully that all made some sense! It's a great little scene, and you've done a terrific job on it already.