Thanks Diarandor, I'm grateful for all the help I've received on the forum.
Neovyse, I appreciate the critiques. I also found the thatched roofs (as well as the tall yellow grass) to be very bright and colorful, but when I tried different colors, they all felt too sad and dull. If you want to recolor anything, feel free! I couldn't find other colors that toned it down without feeling too dull, but maybe you can!
I never noticed the flat bit of the tree, but you're right. As for the shading on the spruce tree, that's also valid. I used one less color on it compared to some of the other trees, because I didn't want it to stand out
as much. One thing I've encountered in this project is that with trees especially, it's a difficult balance to make them stand out enough from the ground and other scenery,without standing out too much and looking busy, as they're often really just background elements. Maybe I'll try making another spruce. Trees are maybe my favorite thing to draw, although the perspective is very difficult.
Side note, just because I love plants- these are meant to be fir or spruce trees. Pines rarely grow in such a cone-shaped form, they naturally drop their lower branches and end up more like the trees directly above them. It's not really important, but I do think in the business of creating tiles meant to represent the natural world, our art can be greatly enriched by a deeper understanding of the things we mean to emulate. The usual thing, in tilesets, is to have one tree and maybe one conifer tree. However- people usually create one "generic" tree. But which tree is it? That's so frequently a weakness 2D games have in representing the natural world,and it makes it hard to convey a sense of the world you've created. Where I live, I can go to a forest on one side of town, and it's fairly wet, full of maples, elms, and Ash trees, each of which are different. But on the other side of town, there are forests on hills full of hickoy and oak trees. Both forests feel totally different to me, and if, as artists, we don't bother to learn about what makes various parts of the natural world feel different, or learn the details of various environments, we can only create generic areas. A forest, or a desert. If we study, we could easily have five different forests in a game that all feel totally different.
Sorry, rant over. I plan someday to write like, an article about how to study the natural world in order the create unique areas in games. But that's why it was important to me to make so many trees for my game. In this tileset, there's apple, american basswood, white pine, oak, poplar, and spruce. Granted, it's really hard to convey them well in 2D at this perspective, but it's important to me to try, haha. I hope others will be inspired to more fully utilize the amazing diversity of the natural world to create works of art that make the player feel like they're in a particular part of nature.
