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Hey this is really good, I especially like the color choices on the trees, great use of complementaries.
What I like most about this art is the way the trees are drawn, but I think drawing and connecting them for each scene would waste a lot of unnecessary time, so I think to simplify things, they could be sliced up and made into several variants to assemble different locations
You can always move some parts around afterwards, if you feel the need. In my experience though, things don't actually look noticeably aligned as long as the tiles themselves aren't blocky or have too much repeating texture, especially when your maps have 2-3 tiles' breathing room between elements. Variant tiles help a lot with avoiding a grid look. Small tiles (8-16px) + randomly selected variant tiles + tile designs where the shapes/positions of things waver = tilemaps that aren't too obviously griddy :D With additional manual tweaks on top of that, I don't think you should have any problems at all.
I think you are right. Though I do worry about it looking a little too grid-aligned if I do it that way, it is probably the correct approach if I want the game to come out this century. Thanks for the advice!
If you're not sure whether you want tiles or not, perhaps it might work to take the middle path: make a tileset and put base scenes together using a tile editor for speed, but then smooth out the blocky bits and add more variation/detail by hand? This way you don't need to make everything work as tiles or even draw tiles for everything, but you also don't need to hand-draw or copy+paste the really basic stuff all the time. You don't get the run-time advantages of tiles this way, but it might be a good way to save a lot of work if you're not planning to use tilemaps in-game anyway.
Great style