In the previous article, I explained how I created the sky for the Wasabi Defense background. Let’s move on to the ground! This is a pretty easy one. Let’s start by creating a new empty layer named “Ground”. In this layer, I created a texture pattern for the ground, like this:

  1. Apply the solid noise clouds filter (Filters->Render->Clouds->Solid Noise) with X and Y size set to 10 and detail set to 4;
  2. Go to Layer->Colors->Colorize and adjust the values until you have the color you want. In my case, I set hue to 40, saturation to 100 and lightness to 20;
  3. Apply gaussian blur with a radius of 5 pixels (Filters->Blur->Gaussian Blur).

You can experiment with these values a bit to get different results. Mine looks like this:

04_01_small.png

This looks a bit like a rocky landscape viewed from above, but what we need is some sort of perspective view. Gimp has a perspective distort tool, but I wasn’t really satisfied with the result of it, so I decided to try something else. I’ll try to explain this as good as I can, so try to follow. I enabled the grid (with snap) and set it to 80×50 (wxh). Next, I selected everything except the top row of grid squares. Here’s a screenshot:

04_02_small.png

Now select the scale tool (shift+T) and make sure “None” is checked under “Constraints”. Click on the selection and the scale dialog box will pop up. The current height of the selection is 1000 pixels, and now I reduced it to 950. When you click OK, the entire selection is shrunk 50 pixels vertically. Next, a new selection is made, but this time two rows of grid squares are left unchecked. Also, I didn’t select all the way to the bottom but just to the lower edge of the texture, like this:

04_03_small.png

And again, the selection is scaled vertically by 50 pixels. This step is repeated, and every time, another row of squares near the top is left unselected. When you can’t scale any further, flip the layer vertically and you’ll end up with something like this:

04_04_small.png

Of course, this is still too big, so we need to do one more step of scaling. Right click on the layer, select “Alpha to selection” and apply the scale tool (shift-T). Set the height to 210 pixels and move the layer to the bottom of the screen. Here’s what we currently have:

04_05_small.png

Now there’s one thing needed to finish it. The ground should get darker in the distance, and for that I used a black to white gradient. I created a new layer and applied a vertical gradient with black on top and then set the layer mode to multiply and the trasparency to 40%, so the white becomes transparent and the black darkens the ground. I tweaked the brightness and contrast of the ground a bit, and here’s the final result:

04_06_small.png

As usual, experiment away with the settings to get different results. In the next tutorial, I’ll explain how I created the hills!