If you want to make a Metroidvania game that takes place on earth, there's a good chance you'll need dirt and grass sprites. This tutorial will scratch the surface just a bit. I'm by no means an expert on environment art because I spend most of my time drawing characters but I think this will help a bit. For the dirt, I like to give it a very pebbly look. I start off with a typical 16px brown square then break it up into little stone shapes. You can really do the shading process in any order you want but this is the order I did.

So you'll get something like that, then you need to test it to make sure it tiles seamlessly. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, you'll just need to tweak the ends a bit. And if the color isn't working out for you, you can always change it like I did.

So that works enough for me, time to add grass. Grass is pretty green and pointy so we can start by sketching.

Pretty simple, but we always need to test out our progress so here's how a bigger picture of how it might look.

Looks okay but a bit plain. The light is everywhere and it burns my eyes. Also the transition between the dirt and grass looks too fake. We need to blend it somehow. What I did was add more shading and made it hang over the dirt a bit like a blanket.

This is better but still burns my eyes because those pebbles are too dang distracting. We need to tone it down a shade and also in "Metroidvania culture", only the border tiles receive the most light from the sun while the tiles tucked behind receive less light.

So there ya have it. I'll stop here and maybe continue this later but you can start many different outdoor environments with this knowledge. This tutorial was just to get some of some of you into tiling. I might want to draw a cemetery a cover another tutorial on it similar tiles so this is a good start. Well see you then.