Working on my environment 2 (28/2/2013)

Going into college to crack on with some work I decided to tackle my environment again. 

First of all I focused on recolouring some of the buildings as looking back over them I felt that the ones closer to the foreground needed to be darker in order to show a better contrast when compared to the buildings in the background.
I also recognised that I couldn't tell what cultural style the back two buildings were meant to be, and on further inspection noticed that the other two were a mix of cultures as well. Therefore I decided that since the buildings are meant to be in a city full of contrasting cultures that I would use the colour scheme that would suit the scene and not necessarily the architectures' origin and design.

I then went on to removing the text on the screen and finding a picture of a mountain surface which I used as a means to create an effective looking backdrop. I was able to do this by tracing over the orignal picture before filling it in with that picture's original colour and then tweaking it where necessary (especially since the fill bucket ended up filling in previously blank areas by accident, thus I had to paint over those individually).
You can see the before and after below.

With the basic colours now complete, I decided to work on the light and shad of my environment. I added a glow to the windows and lights and made the alleys in between the buildings darker. I redid the Christmas lights again as I didn't make them glow nearly enough originally before adding a transparent black layer over the whole environment. With only the glows on top of this filter the enviroment appears lit up.
I even added smoke coming out of the chimney in order to give that building and the street more of a 'lived in' feel.

Overall I am really pleased with my work today as not only have I finished colouring in my piece, but I was also able to light it appropriately. This really shows when you look at the last two screenshots back to back as you could say that these are pictures taken in order to show the city during day and night.
I may go back to this again before the final deadline once I have had feedback from others.
Even though it now looks a lot darker than my usual preference for bright colours in my images, I feel that the colours I have used are still bright enough to keep my action/adventure game genre and atmosphere intact.