To begin with, thanks to everybody who gave me comments and appreciative remarks (including Gayo, who tried to burn me for witchcraft) about my first tutorial. I am glad that everybody appreciated it. However, I have heard some stuff that I don't like the sound of and that I want to clear up.

The first thing I have heard is from Seren: "The tutorials don't work." They do work. Everything I have used to make the tiles in BE:A I am going to document here for you in this series, as well as stuff that has never before seen the light. The next thing that she said is that "It still depends on the skill of the artist." This is bullshit. I confess that a little practice using the techniques I am describing is necessary, but not much. And no matter what you're doing, you will need to practice anyways. As a test, I gave the first tutorial to my good friend Pyro (whose art basically blows goats, no offense Nick) and he was able to create some pretty good looking tiles. I will see if I can dig those up for you; they were better than the average verge tiles. However, some practice is necessary as well as a good sense of what you want to do. Seren, I am a firm believer that you can do it. To keep on screaming and bitching at me that you can't and why the hell am I not working on Revelation is total crap. Just practice for a little while, ok? Puh-lease.

Second, aen had a technical problem with the stencil technique, which other people might have and that I am hoping to clear up. He was under the impression that you could miraculously create a tile grid by using the stencil. This isn't so. What I was talking about was clearing out HAHN01.PCX. Sorry if this caused any confusion. I have heard no other complaints, though. Maybe aen's just stupid.

Today we take a look at a few greater mysteries of life. Tables, chairs, bookshelves, doors, and things that you'd find in a house. These are just an example of how to construct various things that do not willingly want to be textured and shaded according to the procedures that I discussed in the previous tutorial (by the way, I am assuming that you read it, probably

A wooden template is just a simple tile. It consists of 4 16x4 pieces of wood, that have been shaded brightest at the top and darkest at the bottom, but yet without any shading on the left and right sides. Make these in the usual way that you make tiles. You probably want to make a few different sets; it took me a few tries to make the ones that I used for Beyond Eternity. I drew up two really quickly to give you an example of the process. Each of those four components in the tile makes up a board. These boards you can manipulate (with the aid of the Deluxe Paint IIe custom brush tools) to easily create wooden objects. You will want to manually readjust any pixels on the wooden template that seem out of place - just load up your gradient, turn on Shade Technique, click on the brush tool, choose a ù brush, and just left or right click the pixels up or down until they are just right. I recommend you do this in zoom mode (which you get at by clicking on the magnifying glass (DPX-000.PCX))

Take a look at the door that I've created. All I did to create the door frame was extract a 16x2 portion of one of the boards. I rotated it a few times and created the door frame itself, which I then removed a section of to shrink the door so that a 16x24 character (FF3 style) could fit in, whereas a Hahn rip off could not ;). Following that, I grabbed myself a 12x4 piece of board and drew in the doors. And then, the doorknob, which is just 4 pixels drawn by hand with the right shading (upper right brightest, lower left darkest). Ta-da! A door!

Now, you couldn't do that very easily without the aid of the wooden template; it COULD be done with just the shade tool but you'd always be messing things up. Besides, it's sooo much easier to do it with the custom brush tool once you know a few things about how to use the custom brushes:

B) how to actually pick one up; this takes a bit of explaining. I mentioned it in the previous tutorial, but I'm not sure if I did a particularly good job of explaining it. :) You choose the dotted rectangle tool and just drag. This picks up the custom brush. (DPX-001.PCX)

C) that you can create unusually shaped (i.e not rectangular) custom brushes. Hold down with the left mouse button on the actual dotted rectangle tool; a little box will pop up giving you a choice between a "scissors"-style tool and the rectangle tool. I have never found much use for this, but if you were to create a "rock template" you could easily manufacture different sorts of "paved" or "fireplace tile" surfaces. (Note: I have done these; it is really important that when making them you use just a flat texture and highlight each individual "chunk" of the tile. Grab tutorial #1 and look at the cobblestone. See how it is highlighted? (admittedly, not that well, but I made it AGES ago) Good. So don't actually do what I told you to do with the wood texture, where I asked you for the four 16x4 components, OK?)

D) Just as a classroom exercise, grab a custom brush from your wood template, choose the line tool (it's the one that looks like the line), and drag it around! Cool, eh? When I first started playing around with Deluxe Paint, I thought to myself how cool that was.

Making a pretty little flower is loads of fun for the family. Here, the cruel gods of war leave us only one real alternative: Hand pixelling it. I try to avoid hand pixelling, believing it to be largely unnecessary, but here it is. You just have to draw the damn thing. However, we only need to draw one petal.

The petal is happily drawn. Note that the light is on the upper section, not the lower. In the next frame, I have rotated it with the z command so that the light is now coming from the right still. Then I rotated it back to the start position and flipped it so that the light was right; then another flip, rotation, and ANOTHER flip. Note that always the light is still in all the right areas. Then, just draw in the center the same way we did the doorknob. Then, you would paste this onto your grass texture (Except I haven't really covered in that much detail how to make a grass texture yet with you; maybe tutorial 3)

One thing I did with the flower was to give it a few passes with the spray tool to make it look less "linear" and more "hand shaded" and organic. You might want to try this to improve objects that you hand pixel. I find that it gives them more of a texture.

The trick is to attempt to make objects look like they're moving further backwards. The general rule is that if an object is further away, it's more towards the center and less out towards the sides. I have included a piece of table which shows the depths: closest is red, furthest is blue, in between is green and purple. It will look pretty ugly but it serves as a guide: This is how it will be slanted.

I took the wood templates that I made and fashioned a table really quickly. Adding legs was easy; I just took two slices out of the wood template and stuck them in. You will note that one table leg is shorter than the other; this gives it the illusion of being further away. Also, notice the fact that the furthest away bits of table and leg are darker; this is easily accomplished with the shade tool and a custom brush. By the way, if you haven't done so already, I totally recommend that you just play around for a little while with Deluxe Paint's custom brush and shade tools; you know your paint program, you will have a great advantage over those poor fools that don't. The final thing to note in my table (which makes people drool, BTW) is that the grain all goes in the same direction. This is how normal wood looks. It amazed me the first time I noticed that the things that I was building from the wood templates actually had a grain. But it's actually true; they do. I now have three different wood templates for walnut, oak, and cedar, and am currently working on a varnished one. (for advanced users: the main difference is just in color between the three. Also, there's a different "range of colors". Cedar is generally light, oak is generally dark, walnut is inbetween)

In conclusion, I would encourage the more familiar user to try and create a few wooden objects - a chair is really easy (work from the table), some dressers, desks, and maybe even a slightly more complicated object (believe it or not!) - a tree trunk. I have included one from Beyond Eternity <Plug!>, and I have also shown the steps involved in making it. You can see where I pasted on the two bits from my wood template, after shading to make it look rounded, and then in the final one I darkened the entire tile and retouched it by hand to get rid of a few spots that just didn't look quite right.

Stay tuned, folks. If you ever need any help, want to show me something you've done, or just want to chat, mail me at nicholas.vining@bbc.org or just message me on #verge. Make cool tiles and release your devilish creations unto the world. Next episode, I think we'll be doing either trees or dungeon tiles - probably dungeon tiles, since that's what I feel most comfortable myself with.