Drawing realistic-looking backgrounds can be one of the hardest challenges in making an adventure game.
Just looking at your image, I think I can give you a few pointers. As bad as black outlines are in sprites (though sometimes it can fit a very unique style), they are even worse in backgrounds. Outlines will tend to interfere with your sprites and overpower the scene.
The composition also needs improvement. In landscape art, you will never (or rarely) find a painting that has the horizon in the middle (or a 50/50 split between land and sky). In my corrections, I will change the composition slightly, but keep in mind that the entire layout needs to be reworked. (Also, my corrections will be in 24 bit.)
First of all, making backgrounds requires layers, and lots of ‘em.
I’m making the “forest clearing” picture the background layer for reference. I’ll start with the sky on the next layer up from your image. Taking a dark blue, I draw a big area where the sky will be (I will be adding a few hills in the distance to improve the composition).
Next, I take the blend tool (or gradient, depending on the program you’re using) and select a medium blue-gray for one side of the spectrum and a light blue for the other.
I select the blue patch on our “sky” layer with the wand (tolerance select) and draw a line for the angle of the gradient. (Note: the image cannot be in indexed mode to do this)
Now the new sky has a nice range to it, which ends at the lighter blue down by the horizon.
Now it’s time to spice things up with a few clouds. I’ll make a new, temporary layer over “sky” for them.
I start the clouds by drawing their undersides with a medium gray (calligraphic brush). Then I draw the rest of the clouds with an off-white color (overlapping the gray).
Before I merge these rather simplistic clouds with the “sky” layer, I set the “clouds” layer opacity to something like 85%. Since these clouds still look too cartoony for my liking, I attack them with the smudge tool (mostly around the edges). To add a bit more depth to the clouds, I put a tiny stripe of pink-gray along their undersides with the airbrush tool.
The clouds we have look a bit random, so I’m adding some fluffy little clouds with the airbrush tool.
Ok, now that I’m satisfied with the sky, I’m going to make some distant hills. I will draw their basic shape (on a new layer) with a large brush. To enhance the illusion of them being far away, I’m using a brown color that has a lot of gray in it.
Now, taking a smaller brush, I darken several places with the burn tool. To fill out these marks and sculpt the hills, I use the airbrush tool.
I lightly airbrush the hills again, this time with a yellow color (opacity at 40%). Now I apply a noisify filter to the hills (.06 green and .06 red) to give them a little texture.
I’m going to put some trees on the hills, so I take a small brush (dark gray-green at opacity 80%) and manually draw them on a new layer. By drawing over the green again, it gets darker, adding depth to the distant trees. If I don’t like any part of the trees, I simply erase, and the “hills” layer shows back through.
After adding one more noise filter (this time to the trees layer), I darken the small patch of trees on the lower left side of the screen. With the airbrush tool (light gray at 25% opacity) I fade the other trees near the horizon.
Finally, it’s time to work on the main hill (the walkable area in your background). I’ll start this with yet another layer, entitled “hill.” I quickly draw its basic shape with a deep green color.
I’ll start the grass by airbrushing some lighter green along the top edge of the hill and putting some darker green around its base. By using a calligraphy brush, I can achieve a grass texture.
I run a textured brush (charcoal effect) over the hill for a little variety. To enhance the depth of the hill, I run a 20% opaque darker green along the base. I add the blades of grass with a special brush (looks like diagonal claw marks) on the edges of the hill.
To stay true to your original concept, I’m going to add some flowers to the hillside, though not in the foreground. But first they need their own layer. Taking your original flower color (lavender?) plus a darker shade of it, I make a whole bunch of flowers with the calligraphy brush.
They look a little more flowerlike since I’ve added a bit of yellow in the middle of the nearest lavender bits.
Next, I’m going to make the shrub foreground in the lower left corner of the screen. To do this, I make a new layer and draw a very dark green blob. (Objects in the foreground must be very dark otherwise they just confuse the scene.)
Once I have the general shape of the bush, I draw leaves sticking out of it. This silhouette is good enough for the foreground.
Like every other object, the stone gets its own layer. I trace its shape from your original background (on the first layer) with a medium gray. (I also move the stone a little ways up the hill.) I add the shadow around the stone’s base with a 40% opaque dark green.
Now I approximate my gray tones on the stone.
Now, using dodge and burn (set to highlights on 15% opacity) I draw a few cracks and shadows in the stone. I shade these with the smooth tool and the airbrush. After a small (.12 blue) noise filter, I airbrush over it again.
The golden bowl atop the stone also gets its own layer. I draw its silhouette, darken the middle, dodge the top edge, smooth all the edges, and draw its shadow on the stone with a 40% opaque gray. (Probably should have mentioned that the light source is coming from the upper right, though with outdoor day scenes it’s ok to be somewhat vague)
Last but not least, we move on to the trees. Or rather, tree. In order not to unbalance the composition of the background, I’m not going to draw a tree on the left side of the screen (since we all ready have that really dark silhouette of the bush). Once again, the tree will be on its own layer (number ten!), and I’ll move this layer down under the “hill” one.
I draw the outline of the tree with a gray-brown (for the trunk and branches) and a gray-green (for the leaves). You might’ve noticed, that as things get farther into the distance, the grayer the colors I use.
Using the airbrush with a darker shade of brown, I shade the trunk. A bit of softening around the trunk and some of the leaves and it’s time for another noise filter (.05 green on the leaves, .03 red on the trunk).
Some minor touches and the background is complete! (If you want, I can change the image into 256 color fairly easily)
Looking back at this picture, I think there should be less fiddly detail on the distant hills. Also, on this monitor the clouds are probably a bit too gray.
Expect to spend upwards of six hours creating a background like this. (That’s about how long it took me) In the future, I think I only want to give specific advice on backgrounds (like maybe only parts of it) rather than draw the entire thing.
Ian