Tips on how to make my town look better?

[corvus516]

I've placed a lot of paths, PWPs, bushes, flowers, and looked at dream towns for inspiration but nothing seems to be making my town look any better to me.
Are there any particular PWPs, path designs, plants etc that might improve how my town looks and fit with the theme I want? I'm trying to go for a dark theme with mostly red, orange, purple, and black throughout the whole town.

 

[LadyDestani]

Hmmm...Can you give any more details about your theme and what you want your town to look like? Also, do you have the dream suite yet? If you post your dream address, I'd be willing to check it out when I have some time later this week to see if I have any suggestions.

 

[corvus516]

Hmmm...Can you give any more details about your theme and what you want your town to look like? Also, do you have the dream suite yet? If you post your dream address, I'd be willing to check it out when I have some time later this week to see if I have any suggestions.

I've split my town into four quarters where I want each colour to be. The top left is a small neighbourhood with the town hall and my campsite, this is where I want mostly red.

Top right is where Re-Tail, The Roost, the police station, and the town tree are, so it's like a mini Main Street. This part is all orange.

Bottom left is going to be a small park area with benches, fountains, and the flower clock. It's going to be mostly purple and maybe a tiny bit of white because white violets and pansies have a small tint of purple in them.

Bottom right is more of an abandoned area full of black and wilted flowers and trees without leaves. I'm planning on having no houses there apart from my third human character who's going to be a ghost (I dunno, thought it would be interesting).

I do have the Dream Suite but I haven't got a Dream Address because my town's a mess at the moment but if it helps I could make one.

 

[LadyDestani]

Sorry it's taken me so long to reply. I've been a bit busy this week and wanted to put some thought into it.

I honestly think what you've described sounds really nice and it seems like you have a clear vision of what you want. So I guess my question is where do you feel it's lacking? What bothers you about how things are now?

Since you have four distinct areas with different colors, how are the transitions between them? Does it feel harsh at all or does the transition feel natural? I struggled the most with this and ended up using an anchor color (usually white) to tie different areas together. But you could achieve the same thing by intermingling colors at the point of transition.

Your bottom right area sounds really cool. Since it's supposed to be abandoned and dead, I don't know if you've done this already but maybe try spacing out the trees and flowers so they appear sparse. Your paths could also break down in this area to either natural dirt paths or random stepping stones.

Those are all the ideas I've got for now and I don't know how helpful you'll find them, but good luck!

 

[Lullaboid]

Not sure this will help, but it made a big difference for my island... it can help immensely to go to Harv's studio, set the floor and wallpaper to something that makes it look like the outdoors (I usually go for the backyard lawn and the meadow vista), and try to set up a room based primarily on a theme or two (like a particular color or style). It really helps you get an idea for what items and colors look good together when you can mess around with the colors, move things easily, and not necessarily have them all on hand.

Once I'm satisfied, I take a screenshot for reference. Of course, once I actually set things up outside it doesn't translate perfectly, but it always turns out nice and vaguely similar regardless. And over time I found myself getting an intuitive feel for what items look good together and where- and often not items I would have thought to combine without trying them out on Harv's island first.

 

[corvus516]

This was for my New Leaf town (I don't play New Horizons), but that may help if I instead search for images of people's creations in Harv's studio for inspiration!

 

[Lullaboid]

This was for my New Leaf town (I don't play New Horizons), but that may help if I instead search for images of people's creations in Harv's studio for inspiration!

Oops, thought I was in the New Horizons section! My bad.

For New Leaf, all I can think to recommend is checking out lists of horror towns and seeing where they took the dark themes (but it looks like dream inspo was something you already tried). In any case, best of luck!

 

[RedPanda]

I like to use trees to section off zones. I have seen some really nice use of bamboo as well for this purpose, as it is tall and is useful for carving out areas.

 

[letisbloom]

If you are looking for a dark aspect trees you can plant perfect fruit trees and collect the fruits until the tree dies, it will give you 2 perfect fruits and 1 rotten fruit (I believe this only works with your native fruit, only tryed with this), the tree will die them and became permantly without leaves, unless you remove it.