Hello!I'm new to this forum and I need some help from you! I'm planning to do a cartoon adventure game on a Curse of Monkey Island style of art,since I find the backgrounds and the characters gorgeous. I have Photoshop and I was planning to color my backgrounds with this program,so I really needed some tips/techniques on coloring Curse of Monkey Island style.Some basic things like color composition,which colors do best with each other...mostly any help regarding coloring backgrounds in a cartoon style. Thanks in advance for all the help.^__^

This kind of thing is very hard to sum up in a single post.

By saying that you want to 'color background art', I'm assuming that you're intending to scan hand-drawn art and use Photoshop to give it some life. If this isn't the case, then it probably should be. There are very few people I know, even in the industry, that can make brilliant 2D artwork directly on the computer.

Other than that, you'd probably be best investing in a Wacom tablet (Damn I say that a lot around here). They're kind of expensive, but it really does make a huge difference, and you should notice it almost immediatly, although they can take a little bit of getting used to.

As for composition, this is something that really varies depending on what kind of mood you're going for, and can only really be decided upon by you. Go through Monkey Island and making a lot of notes about how they light their scenes, what colors they use to express paticular moods, and mainly how they fill in vast quantities of space (Which for background art will be your primary objective).

About the best concrete advice I can give here is use layers, and lots of them, because it becomes a lot easier to shift things around or even remove them this way.

Basicly,I was intending to have my own backgrounds and characters hand-drawn and then scan them and coloring them in Photoshop.Any more help/techniques/tips would be great.Also,tutorials on coloring backgrounds for adventure games would be very useful.
Thanks in advance!

I believe you will enjoy my tutorial then !
And please dont be afraid to rate me if you find it useful, eh?

:)

Hey, great idea we are just short of good old-style adventures nowadays!

"ome basic things like color composition,which colors do best with each other...mostly any help regarding coloring backgrounds in a cartoon style"

What you ask here is mostly connected to the basics of imaging, and not with Monkey Island. :D

So I recommend to search the net for tutorials about forms and colors. I am sure you'll find one that suits your needs.
www.polykarbon.com could be a good start, and as I remember there is a link section. Or you might try www.epilogue.net where
the best of the best write tutorials. (and has galleries)

As for colour theory, well, you'd be surprised to see that Google actually gives you some good pointers :
This website, the first Google hit, sums up the basics quite nicely. When I was in Fine Arts, I was told that Van Gogh was the first to really write about the whole thing, and sure enough, I googled another useful link :
<a href="http://painting.about.com/od/colourtheory>About.com

Hope this helps ? :)