Pixelling Textured objects Help

[Vercingetorix]

I've been looking at the background art in some of the Castlevania games lately and i was just wondering what the best way to approch pixelling brickwork and stone architecture etc that has very unique patterns or texture to it would be.
A simple example would be a tiled wall that is made of marble, or a more complex example might be a gargoyles head carved from marble.

Alot of the colouring tutorials that i've seen either cover drawing characters with fairly smooth textureless surfaces or a single block of texture but nothing that combines the two together into a complex form with a distinct surface or pattern. So i'm just curious as to how i should approach something like this - should i define the form of the object and the texture/pattern seperately then somehow combine them together or is the whole problem best tackled as one.

any help and advice is much appreciated
thanks

[Ai]

It depends on the software you are using. In Promotion or Grafx2, which have a paint mode which lightens/darkens pixels,
it really doesn't matter -- just do what seems to produce the clearest result. In less advanced programs, I would probably render the form of the object first and then texture it.

More subjectively, I believe that it's very helpful to think of the object as a 3d wireframe mesh. Hence I also think rendering the form first is likely to make it easier to map the texture onto the surface correctly.

Anyway, if it is as I suspect and you haven't really tried Grafx2 or Promotion, grab one of them (grafx2 is opensource and free: http://code.google.com/p/grafx2/ , promotion has a trial version.) and try to use the shading facilities* to mimic an effect you want.. it's pretty enlightening and can really help your work flow, experience with these shading tools.

* for grafx2, a quick intro to shading:
  1. draw a filled white circle (first color in the 3rd column)
  2. rightclick on the black color in that same gradient to set it as BG.
  3. click FX, then the 'QShade' button
  4. select the brush tool (or something -- whatever you want -- rightclicking on the brush tool button until it turns into a blob gets you the contour-fill tool, which can be rather fun..)
  5. rightclick to darken, leftclick to lighten areas/pixels