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volume 1, issue 19

Today in loonygames:

New!! The Archives have been cleaned up, fead links fixed, and printable versions restored! Also, don't miss the new comments on the front page!

Livin' With The Sims: theAntiELVIS explores the wild and wacky world that is Will Wright's The Sims, asking the inevitable quesiton, "is The Sims the first step toward a virtual life where everyone is Swedish?"

Pixel Obscura: Josh Vasquez on Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

Real Life: Check out our newest comic strip, Real Life! Updated daily!

User Friendly: Updated daily!

Related Links:

DRAW Partner!: Chris Buecheler's article on games and 2D art.

The Texture Studio: Chris' texture home page, with tons of textures for you to download.

Feedback:

You've got an opinion...voice it! Drop a line to our Feedback column...you could end up with a free T-Shirt!

Random Feature :

Hey Half-Life fans! Looking for some good reads? Check out Valve designer Harry Teasley's guest editorial, our review of Half-Life, or our interview with Marc Laidlaw!

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Graphic Content:
Creating a Hand Drawn Texture

By Christopher "shaithis" Buecheler

ey all. Running behind on deadlines this week. Eww. But, after I got a pleasant ICQ from my fearless editor asking for this article, I figured it might be a good idea to actually write it. So, here we are at my "Hand-Drawn" tutorial. Time to include some disclaimers, as my articles seem to do. First, when I say "Hand-Drawn" (which I won't be quoting or capitalizing from this point forth), I don't mean "every pixel placed by hand, with the mouse". Hand-drawn simply means (for me) "no photo-base used". Now, in this particular texture (albeit not until the next article) does in fact deal quite a bit with "true" hand-drawn work. I'll be using my tablet to add a lot of detail. But this half of the article is almost exclusively filters. So...don't hate me for calling it hand-drawn. :)

Anyway, on with the texture.

Make a 512x512 image. Make a new layer. Fill that layer with brown.

Add a light bit of noise. I do this with almost _all_ of my hand-drawn textures. It helps (especially when size is reduced) to give a more convincing, random, "real-world" feel to them.

Using Eye Candy's "HSB noise" feature, I added in some "wood grain" (not very realistic just yet).

Now I'm reducing size using my patented "drop halfway....

...sharpen and drop the rest of the way" technique. MAKE SURE you flatten your layers before resizing like this (I didn't, and thus had to go through a bunch of trouble to get rid of a seam that appeared). This leaves us with....

A 256x256 wood grain. I added some light shadows and hilights with the dodge/burn tool. Still not terrifically realistic looking, but that's not a problem. See, we're going to be doing a lot of work with the dodge/burn tool next week.

(Continued on next page)

Credits: Graphic Content is © 1998 Christopher Buecheler. All other content is © 1998 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited, so don't do it, or we'll paint you white against a white background.