Trees

I gathered some pictures of trees from the Howff Cemetery in Dundee. The contorting shapes of the trees with the twists and odd trimmings would be useful for design in Photoshop/Illustrator.

less leaves show more twisting branches, which is good for a gothic theme

Odd tree trimmings can make a great underpass within the game

I decided to test one of the trees to see how to design with my graphics. First of I wanted to try with my brushes for the leaves and the pen tool for the branches and trunk. I downloaded the grunge brushes from Brusheezy site to get that texture and dirty look. I overlapped each brush with the layers and then merged them together. The final result produced a paint splatter design, with a lot of detail. I want to leave the trunks just plain black and focus on the leaves with the shape of the tree in whole. I enjoy this design as it was something I was aiming for.

Splatter-look vs. Graphics

I then decided to try my own approach which is using simple graphics, creating a minimalist tree. The end result is a nice and neat design, and would look good in a DS game. However, for the style and type of game I am aiming for it does not match the criteria. I wanted the trees to be more defined and detailed. Even though I do enjoy the graphics it does not match with the style of my game, which is a gothic adventure mix.

I think I will produce more trees using the grunge paint splatter look than the neat graphic look. I will need to produce about 5 more trees to get some concept on the images.