Park

[ceddo]

That grass in the center looks photo-realistic, great job on that.
However, the water in the background doesn't really translate as water to me. You made a dark line of blue where the sea met the land, and that gives it a strange form (makes it appear like some sort of gel rather than water). Get rid of that, and add some sand/rocks/vegetation to make the transition between the park area and the water smoother.

[Oceans Dream]

Alright, awesome. I worked on it some more, and added a Sky:

Worked on the water too, hopefully it's better now.

[Chalk]

This is looking very good. my one suggestion would be to make the flower a red. basic color theory. if you have a tiny bit of red in an almost green composition it will really stand out.

[Turbo]

The grass texture and trees shadows' shapes makes the terrain on the background look flat, losing the perspective effect. If you notice the reference, the further the trees are from us, the more their shadows change from blobs into horizontal lines. The grass on the furthermost terrain is rendered to show the same detail as the one closest to us, which also removes depth effect; try suggesting texture through smaller and subtle grass shapes.

While the whole piece looks great, there seems to be a discrepancy of styles: the trees look cartoony, with large blobs of color, while the grass looks realistic. Just stating that

You could push for more depth on the leaves by showing greater contrast between the trees' groups of branches (not changing the colors, but having big changes in contrast between leaves of trees at different distances from the observer).

Great rendering, palette and texturing!

[Frychiko]

This is looking fabulous! Great job!

There's a real issue with the perspective making the image look flat, not sure how to fix it though. But these are my thoughts:
- You've got three rows of trees, and all three rows are equally distanced, so depth is lost.
- the tree shadows on the floor aren't consistent (some suggest low horizon level, some suggest high horizon level

With your latest image, you have an orange sky. But you've done all your shading using white light, which looks really out of place.

May I tinker with the image? Do you have a PSD file or something?

[Oceans Dream]

I don't use Photoshop for sprite work, so no psd file for them.









The Sky, Grass, and Water got merged with some other stuff and I didn't save the original layers. I did save the tree layers though.

The comments here have been very useful, thanks for them! (Though I do want to make other backgrounds...)