I had a lot of fun with the China background. I got a little crazy with the patterns, but Flash made it pretty easy.

So here's a screenshot inside Flash. Same as the Egypt background, I imported a rough sketch done in Photoshop. Then I start using the line tool to draw in the objects. One thing that makes it so easy to draw in Flash, is that when a line intersects another, you can click on a segment to delete it. If you look at the table, all those little overlapping lines can be deleted, then I can grab the corner with the arrow and move it, pull it, push it, adjust however I want. It's a bit hard to show that concept in just a screenshot.

I really took advantage of the deleting segment concept with these patterns. I basically drew grids, and then selectively deleted segments inside the grids to make the fancy patterns. On the blue pattern above, I changed the line width of certain segments to add more to the pattern.

Just lots of more straight lines. To make curves from a straight line, you just use the arrow tool, click down on the middle of the line and drag, and you get a curve. It's pretty slick. If a shape is a little more complicated, I'll use the pencil tool. You can draw your line, and Flash gives you the option of smoothing out your curves, or straightening your lines for you.

I originally had different buildings in the background (you can see the old buildings in the next image) but I wasn't real happy with them, so popped back into Flash, made some new lines, and took them back into Photoshop. You can probably get the picture by now that there's a lot of back and forth between Flash and Photoshop. It's all pretty flexible.

Here's an early pass at starting to color. At this stage I'm mostly just trying to figure out the colors and values of everything.

The finished background.

This is just to show some of the objects that sit around in the room. I had a hard time with this whole project, in that I have a hard time wrapping my brain around drawing backgrounds. I definitely prefer drawing characters. But these were fun, first because it was all a big experiment figuring out this whole Flash to Photoshop method, and secondly, I just loved researching all the crap to put in these rooms.

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