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http://www.scummbar.com/resources/articles/index.php?newssniffer=readarticle&article=1013&page=2

To answer two of the questions posted during the last millenium ( Still, I think it's valuable info for anyone )

This is the way Bill Tiller painted the CMI backgrounds :
[Quoting from an interview in www.scummbar.com]

"The Project Leaders would give me a written description of a room or a small rough sketch and then I would make five or six sketches, in rough form, to show them and get feedback. I would then scan the rough drawing in to Photoshop and make all the changes the PLs wanted there. This rough scanned in sketch also went to the programmers and was used as temporary art so that they had some thing besides programmer art to work with. I would then print the scanned rough sketch out on a black and white laser printer. The printer paper was too small, 8” and a half by 11”. I would then blow up the printed sketch with a photocopy machine till it was about 11” by 14”. That was the size of the marker paper I would use, and I used marker paper because we had a ton of it lying around, thanks to Peter Chan, and the pencil went on it more smoothly than sketch paper.

I did all this scanning and photocopying to keep the proportion of the small rough sketch correct, because it was what the PLs approved and I wanted it to be accurate. I would then slip the photocopy under a piece of marker paper and sketch over it with blue pencil. The marker paper was almost as transparent as tracing paper but it was stronger and scanned well. I used the blue pencil because it is very light and I could sketch the layout without worrying about any mistakes because it wasn’t the final drawing anyway. The final step was to take the blue sketch that I just finished and put that under another sheet of marker paper and with pencil, draw the final line drawing. This was the final image so it had to be sharp and clean.

I would then scan it back in to the computer. In Photoshop, I would paint in some rough colors for my background painters to use. This was painted under the finished line drawing on a digital layer below the line drawing.

Next I would either do the final painting myself, if I had time, or I would hand the color rough over to Maria Bowen or Kathy Hseih for them to do the final painting. The last step required me to reduce the colors down to 245 from eight million. For this step I used DeBabbleizer, a program that specializes in just this sort of thing. The game could use 256 colors but the backgrounds only had 245. The rest went to the interface, inventory and to Guybrush’s palette."

And a tutorial on how to transform colored images to b/w ones and how to get rid of all the grays in a b/w image using the levels function :

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Sketch_Effect/

I would suggest a new competition in the lights of sprite jam and background blitz. A solution in between actually.

A competition where you compose and paint a character/scene in high-res/low-res (whatever). Sprite jam is too restrictive with the color and size limit and background blitz is all about a functional background, and as such there is no room for character creation and scene-playout. I realise it will take time to create such an image, but this works fine in the bg blitz. I've seen some beautiful character images from Mashy and some other people, so I know there is the possibility for multiple entries.

True, it's not quite relevant to the game-production theme going on in the forums but it's a great practice method and it can work as concept for a general scene from a game. Think as an example, the painting of a girl who could be the protagonist in a game, or a scene from a game, featuring a knight holding his sword ready to strike. Maybe a mythical beast or a homeless man asking for money.

some examples (though a bit advanced but well in the spirit of the competition) :
http://madeliene.republika.pl/black-unicorn.jpg
http://uk.games-workshop.com/darkelves/reference/images/cold-one-knight.jpg