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I noticed a lot of isometric views of grass tiles, but this is going to be for overhead/ three quarters type view. Just one thing to say about grass tiles, it is a good idea NOT to try to smudge or blur your tile once you complete it on order to blend it. The only thing that tends to accomplish is to make your tile look less detailed than it did in the first place :) Of course this is assuming that you want to make SD3 type grass tiles. OK so lets start with our tile...we are going to reduce the color depth to 4bit color depth (16 colors) and choose three shades of greens. The first one should be rather dark, with a low intensity (mixing a little "grey" to the color). Also, we are going to make our green a little on the yellowish side, so that it looks more like an olive color than anything else. This will help give you the natural looking green that suits grass tiles well in my opinion. Also , when you choose your lighter shades of green, i tend to continually add a little more yellow in each time, so that the highlights of your grassblades are not neon or flourescent yellow...heh. Alright, here is a little preview of what my 'palette' looks like thus far.
So now that we have some colors chosen our first, and easiest step, is to fill in the background of the grass tile... all you have to do is paint fill/flood your whole tile with the darkest green that you have selected so far. This will be the underlying grass layer that is generic, and just gives the tile some depth. heres what it looks like.
Now its time to start making our actual grassblades. Just know that these are not simply one pixel thick straight lines, they have some thickness to them, and they usually curve a little. heres the starting of the grassblades coming into form.
What we are essentially doing, is working our way from the center of the tile , outwards. We want our grass blades to kindof flow... and we want them to flow outwards, making the grass blades in the center of the tile thicker, and have them gradually get thinner and smaller as we travel towards the edge. Depending on if you want a bushier feel to your grass, or a thinner, finer grass feeling, adjust the width of your grass blades as necessary. Ok, after that, continue to fill in your grass blades towards the outer part of the tiles. Dont be afraid to only draw half a grassblade that goes off of the tile, then when you make the adjacent tile, youll just have to continue that grass blade (and hence making the two tiles actually tile together seamlessly). heres an update of how our tile is shaping up.
Now that we have our basic blades of grass made, we are going to go in and give our larger blades of grass some highlights. our highlights are not going to extend the full length of the grass blades... and they are only going to be one pixel thick for the most part. notice that there are no STRAIGHT LINES used to represent the higlights, everything is curved a slight bit. straightlines tend to cause eyesores on your whole tile, and make tiling less effective, since the straight line can be spotted out from a mile away. Ok, naturally, since our larger grass blades are towards the center of the tiles, so should *most* of the highlights be concentrated. lets look how its shaping up.
The first version has an oddly coloured highlight, so i made it a little darker and added a bit more yellow into it. This could suffice as a fine grass tile... but lets say you want to give it just a liiiiitle more depth. edit your palette, and choose another color slightly darker than your previously darkest hue. here is what my palette looks now.
Now what we are going to do with this darkest shade, is we are going to cast mini shadows that somewhat outline the blades of grass. this is going to add more depth to the over all image and will give your existing grass blades that 'pop' which will grab the viewers attention. here is how the final grass tile looks like.
This can double the size of the image to make a perfectly suitable 32x32 tile as well. now this little tile only took about 10 minutes to make, and you can easily tile them by connecting the overlapping grassblades from one tile to the next.
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