Random New Textures

[bgraybr]

This morning I threw together these three textures, I made them all from scratch using Microsoft Paint. I want to start making sprites, but I'm having trouble because I don't know how to draw people/animals/3D at all (even on paper).

These are probably to cartoony for Doom (it's my first attempt), but I thought I'd post them anyways.

some sort of metal flat...

texture similar to metal2 I guess...

yellowish-green bricks...

[Creaphis]

If you decide you're serious about learning to make good sprites, then that would also help you make textures that are less "cartoony." Being an effective artist is all about learning how to draw things how they actually look, instead of how you think they look. This would be a good book for you to work through.

There's also room in this world for cartoony mods, mind you.

[gggmork]

Creaphis said:

Being an effective artist is all about learning how to draw things how they actually look, instead of how you think they look.
There's also room in this world for cartoony mods, mind you.

If your goal is to draw realistic stuff of course (but your last sentence acknowledges that). I used to draw surreal stuff a lot and let anything emerge on the imagination without really questioning it.

[Hellbent]

i like the metal ones.

[The_MártonJános]

Hellbent said:

i like the metal ones.

Those would make great locker doors for a "school" map.

[EarthQuake]

They're not bad. But they're not finished either!

The steps I took to produce the above from your texture:
1. Opened the image, duplicated it as another layer.
2. Made one layer have a brown hue, the other a green hue.
3. Made the top layer use a dissolve blending style (which randomly hides pixels from the top, letting the bottom show through).
4. Selected the "vents" and cut them to a new layer, on top.
5. Desaturated that layer a bit and gave it some more pronounced shadows.
6. Converted to the Doom palette, using dithering.

I think I might have reduced the contrast somewhere in there, but I can't remember. That was just a 5 minute job too. You, too, can learn to do this stuff if you get your hands on a serious image editor and learn how to use all of it's features. It makes creating textures a breeze.

One thing to note about your work so far, is that your contrast is way too high. Your shadows and highlights are what is making it look "cartoony". Some noise and color variation (even if minor), can also make a big difference.

[magicsofa]

-really- good for mspaint

[EarthQuake]

Also did something similar here, since the greens you used didn't really fit into the Doom palette:



It could probably use a bit more shadow around each brick, however.

[bgraybr]

EarthQuake said:

One thing to note about your work so far, is that your contrast is way too high. Your shadows and highlights are what is making it look "cartoony". Some noise and color variation (even if minor), can also make a big difference.

Heh, thanks; that looks much better. I have an older copy of Photoshop and Paint.net on my other computer, I'll have to mess around with these images myself later. If you look closely I started to add a bit of shading and noise, but it got old trying to do it with the pen tool in paint so I stopped.

[Creaphis]

gggmork said:

If your goal is to draw realistic stuff of course (but your last sentence acknowledges that). I used to draw surreal stuff a lot and let anything emerge on the imagination without really questioning it.

I feel it's worth pointing out that surreal stuff is still best if drawn realistically. When drawing monster sprites you face a special challenge of imagining a three-dimensional creature and drawing it so that all its various sprites for different frames and view directions consistently represent the same anatomically-believable creature. It's easier to do this if you already have a lot of experience drawing real things because, once you've learned how to draw things that are real, you can start to learn how to draw fake things as if they were real.

Even then, very few artists can draw such things without any form of reference. If I wanted to draw a full set of monster sprites I would make/beg/steal a model to photograph or base drawings off of.