Background Tutorial by Carl-Johan

Welcome to my Background tutorial. When I paint my backgrounds I usually use an old Ms-Dos paint program called Deluxe Paint II but also a bit of Photoshop. Just getting your hands on Deluxe Paint II can be a difficult task, but just search the net and you will find a copy. It's important that you use Deluxe Paint and not deluxe animation studio for this tutorial.

This is the background that we are going to paint:

Part 1 - Drawing the layout.

When I draw the layout for my backgrounds I usually use Photoshop. If I want to paint a "room" for example, I check out the Last Crusade backgrounds so I get the same angles in my background. But if you are painting backgrounds that doesn't have to resemble Last Crusade backgrounds you can use the "correct angles". Most backgrounds in Last Crusade are around 320x 150 ( the single screen once) so around that size is most of my single screen rooms. Now draw your room layout in Photoshop or in your favourite paint program. My room layout in this tutorial will look like this:

This is the basic layout for our background. Usually I do all the basic layouts myself but this layout I can credit our new team member Francois for. And lucky me only had to add the colours and gradients to this background which only takes about two hours.

Now when the layout are ready, save the file as .pcx format, but before you do, make sure that you have changed the colour mode to" index". To do this in Photoshop click" image" on the menu, choose "mode", click "indexed colours".

Part 2 - Choosing the colours.

You probably have an idea of what colours you want to use for your background. In our case we want the background to look like the Barnett College backgrounds from Last Crusade. To make this possible I need the palette from one of those backgrounds. There are a few programs out there that can extract backgrounds from old SCUMM games. "Lucas Riper" seems to work best, as you can save the backgrounds as palette, but you can also take a screenshot from the game. If you take a screenshot it is wise if you use a screen capture program so that you get all the colours from the background. I would then save the screen to .pcx in Photoshop using the method I described above.

When I have a copy of the Last Crusade background I open Deluxe Paint II and open my own background. I then copy the picture using the "copy tool" You might have to change the white colour since it gets transparent when copy it. After I have copied my background I open up the background from Last Crusade and paste my own background in it. Now it should look like this:

To the right you can see a part of the image from Last Crusade that I am using.

As you see the colours changes after you have pasted the image. This normal, so don't worry. It has to do with the different palettes. I start with the wall (Note that I will add a window later). I look at the wall from the original background (in this case the corridor at Barnett College) and I choose the colours for my gradient. I want to use these colours, so how do I do it?:

Part 3 - Using gradients.

So how do I make a gradient out of these colours? It's easy. Just click the gradient button to the right. You now get to the gradient menu which looks almost the same as the one we just looked at. Now start by selecting the first colour that we want to use for the gradient and click build to the right. Now select the last colour for the gradient. Now it should look like this:

The Gradient is now built. Let's use it! Click ok to get back to our background. Now click on the gradient button:

Click the "fill tool" with the right mouse button:

Make sure the settings are like this:

Now left click the "fill tool" and use it on the walls. The result should look like this:

Make sure that you have the brightest colour at the bottom of the wall and the darkest at the top.

Time for the wood panels. For the panels I make a gradient out of these four colours:

Now before you click ok you must add some splatter to this gradient. In this way the colours mix more random than they did on the wall. Choose this splatter setting:

Now Paint the wood panels. The result should look like this:

It looks better but we still need to add some details to the wood panels. I just checked out how they looked in Last Crusade and my final result on the wood panels look like this:

Now I do the same thing to the board:

Now it is time for the door. This is one of the more tricky parts of the room. Before I add gradients to the door I have to paint all the details on how I want the door to look:

I start with the upper wood gradient. This one is easy. Just do as you did with the wood panels. When that gradient is done I do the window gradient. I want to use two separate gradients for the window. One for the area in the shadow, a darker gradient. And one for the rest of the window. I start by doing the darker area by filling the whole window with it. After that I paint the lighter area over the darker one, leaving just a string from the darker gradient. See picture below. For the dark gradient I used maximum splatter.

Now do the same for the rest of the door. Final result on the door should look something like this:

Note that on the lower part of the door I changed the filling tool setting to highlight. You can do this too, but it takes a bit of experimenting to get it to look good.

This is a door from last crusade compared to my door. The door to the left is from last crusade. With some more adjustment you can get your door to look almost exactly the same, but I am happy with the result for now:

The final thing we have to do in Deluxe Paint is the ceiling. I have found a room at Barnett College from the Last Crusade game that has wooden bars at the top. I open that room and paint my own ceiling in that room. I have to paint it in that room because of the palette. When the ceiling is done save the picture. It should look like this:

You can of course import the colours to our background image but I think it is easier this way.

Part 4 - Fixing and pasting in Photoshop.

Now I save my image and open it in Photoshop for the final details. When you open an image made in Deluxe Paint II in Photoshop it looks a bit strange, but no worry. Just click "image" on the menu, chose "pixel aspect ratio" and click "square". Now everything should look fine. Copy the wood bars we just made and open up our classroom-picture. Change the colour mode to RGB before we paste. Now paste the ceiling into our classroom.

Now it is time to fix the floor. This can be done in both deluxe paint II or in photoshop, but since Photoshop is so easy to use, let's us it.

I'm starting with using the colour: RGB 138, 82, 0 on the wood floor. and the darker colour 77, 46, 0 on lines on the wood floor. I then use noise filter 2,51% uniform with monochromatic on the floor. On the desk I use 74, 34, 6 to paint the outline and fill the desk with the colour 86, 42, 6. You should also shade the desk a bit by using some lighter colours on the side of the desk or by using the light/darken tool carefully.

Now you picture should look something like this:

Now time for the most important thing... THE DETAILS!

I added these details.

1. Map - I opened up a map room from Last Crusade and re-sized it.
2. Bookcase - I looked through all the Last crusade backgrounds and found some bookcase but I hade to change the colours a bit.
3. Windows - Easy to paint. You decide how you want them to look.

After some adjustment this is the final result:

Good Luck!

Carl-Johan Hagberg