Waterfall spume problem

Hi,

I have a path setup for my clouds and want to repurpose it as waterfall spume. Unfortunately due to the tiled nature of NES games it looks a bit silly with the spume and the blue background on my dirt tiles (see waterfall 2 in the picture).
I changed one blue of the fume palette to the background blue and changed the edges to brown (waterfall 1). I think it still looks a bit weird.
How do you guys handle a problem like this?

The first image looks good for me (and nicer when I zoom out )

You could use fake monsters to cover up the bits that you need to have a certain color, but obviously those would take up monster slots on the screens where it's used. A lot of people have used monsters as special effects in lieu of having access to animated tiles, and could be made to work similarly to cover up the gaps.

Your graphics are great for both, but if faced with a choice, I'd go with the first. Provided, you don't have intentions of having bigger spumes that go below the waterline. Then you may want to reconsider. Figuring out how to design tiles so that they blend as well as possible with other tiles is part of the charm of NES designing.

My treetop paths are similar. They may be up against the tree trunks, sand, grass, rocks, or whatever. So I designed them to have borders vague enough that they should work well in most cases, but inevitably, there will be odd colors appearing in come cases.

Thank you all for your input. I think I'll keep the left version and look to rework it so the brown pixels at the bottom and top are blue.
When I started work on the left version I realized I used 3 blue tones and didn't use the background blue for my advantage.

jsherman said:

Figuring out how to design tiles so that they blend as well as possible with other tiles is part of the charm of NES designing.

Click to expand...

Yes, it's a huge task for me, but while it's challenging it also makes it interesting and rewarding.

Dirk said:

...while it's challenging it also makes it interesting and rewarding.

Click to expand...

Complety agree with you on that <3