Backgrounds - Lemoncake House and Main Village

I managed to complete two backgrounds today, one from scratch and the other which needed to be edited.

This is the new background, a lemoncake house, which is what Mozbie runs up to when he eats the wafer biscuit door and the cola bottle sweet. It took me about a good 8 or so hours to make it from start to finish, but ideally I want to shorten that to four hours so I can complete 2 backgrounds a day. The main problem was getting accustomed to Adobe Illustrator, as I had never used it before so it was rather baffling! So this whole time has been sort of a learning process for me to try to get to grips with a new piece of software, but I am now at the point where I feel comfortable with Illustrator and I can work in it quicker. The other problem was when I had to use Photoshop for the texturing stage - the textures had to match those in the Main Village background, which took time as I had to figure out which ones to use. It was also difficult to get the textures looking right and matching each other. But now that I know what to use and how to get the textures looking good, things should be a little easier from now on, and hopefully I will meet my goal when I start on them come Monday.

So this is the lemoncake background, which I will show in two stages (NOTE: the textures are all of our own from our own taken photos):

 

This is the finished background when I made it in Illustrator, which looks rather simple with the bold colours and minimilistic shapes. Some of the textures will have opacity so the colours shown here will be seen through them.

And this is the finished background from Photoshop. Nearly every part of the background has a texture, other than the small items on the floor and the candy cane door archway. The shading (which I found to be very fun!) helps to give the background more of a 3D effect. Overall I'm really pleased with this background, I think it's aesthetically pleasing and the style we've gone for really helps make the village look like it's made out of sweets. Hopefully now that I know what I'm doing further backgrounds will be quicker to make!


This is the Main Village background, which I needed to edit so it would fit with our new changes. These changes were that there was not to be anything made out of chocolate. So this meant changing the one cake house from chocolate to lemon, replacing the chocolate doormats with ones made out of fudge, the chocolate on the roof which is now toffee, the chocolate doughnuts had to be changed to a normal one, the doors had to be changed to biscuits, and the curly wurly style biscuit (which our characters were going to climb) had to be removed, and instead I just moved the drainpipe to where it was placed for our characters to climb instead. The other thing which needed changing was the hot tub had to be emptied of chocolate, as now we've decided it will be filled up when the volcano erupts. And the removal of chocolate altogether was because the marshmallow people had to react to it, so if they had chocolate already then why would they get all excited about more chocolate?

So yeah, here is the original background:

And this is the background with my changes (I also made the small change of moving the doughnut over to the other side of the lemoncake house and changing the cola bottle to a different colour).