Landscapes are not videogame webcomics

Brolo

Been a while since I posted in the AC. My brother asked me to paint him something for his new house, but gave me discretion over the subject matter.



The beach was modeled after Font Hill in Black River, Jamaica. The silhouettes on the bottom are my brother, sister and I. They're deliberately left with a lack of detail, particularly on the facial features.

I have some progress pics of the steps I used here, and a neat-o 3.5 meg gif of the whole thing.

In my infinite wisdom I have managed to save over the large version of my original work, but using a combination of Illustrator's vector tracing, photoshops recolouring tools and some creative blending I have a full size version of the pic, which I'm going to send for printing.

C&C away guys, I'd really like to know what you think.

Mayday

Is your brother holding a severed hand?

The whole pic is fucking splendid, maybe apart from the very beach- it seems to lack detail in comparison to the rest of the image, making it look a bit unfinished. The colours are sweet.

wakkawa

lawls thats what I thought.

There are some major problems in composition, the biggest being you have two very seperate pictures, seperated at where the water starts. This is probably because the figures are not in perspective with the rest of the picture. These two things look good on their own, they just dont blend together.

Edcrab

Yeah. Almost gives the impression that everything below the very top of the car's roof was added as an afterthought.

But I've got to say: that's an utterly gorgeous sky you've got there. There's nothing bad about the ocean and figures, but the shifting tones of the clouds and hills are fantastic.

Brolo

Mayday wrote: »

Is your brother holding a severed hand?

The whole pic is fucking splendid, maybe apart from the very beach- it seems to lack detail in comparison to the rest of the image, making it look a bit unfinished. The colours are sweet.

haha, it's supposed to be a conch shell.


I can definitely see what you guys are saying about the composition, although I'm not really sure how to fix it. I'm particularly interested in what Wakka was saying about the perspective of the figures - at this point I'm not really sure what to do with them.

Mayday

Look at the whole pic and tell me where the horizon is. My guess is somewhere at the level of the leaves of the palms in the foreground (or somewhere at the level of the roof). As you probably know, the horizon defines the eye-level of the viewer. That would mean the viewer is far above the figures- yet they are painted as if they were at the same level, not below.

Brolo

Ahhhh.... now I see it.

I really should have spotted that earlier.

WastingPenguins

If you've got the .pdf of Andrew Loomis' figure drawing book that's been floating around, there's LOTS of helpful stuff in there about drawing figures in perspective with a horizon. There's even a page with figures on a beach, showing how to draw them from varying perspectives. I suggest checking it out. It's called "Figure Drawing for All Its Worth", google it.

DMAC

I wouldn't have guessed that it was finished. There seems to be more detail in the background foliage than in any of the foreground elements. It still looks very vague and fuzzy, and not in an intentional, impressionistic way.

Brolo

DMAC wrote: »

I wouldn't have guessed that it was finished. There seems to be more detail in the background foliage than in any of the foreground elements. It still looks very vague and fuzzy, and not in an intentional, impressionistic way.

Yeah, once I destroyed my originals thanks to a bad batch action work pretty much had to stop. All of my PSDs are now the size of the .gif I linked to earlier up (400x800), and I honestly don't have the heart to rework the painting from this point without my layers. I feel like I'm coming up with excuses, but I've learned a lot doing this one (and even more thanks to you guys) and it's time to move on.

rts

Rolo, I really love the light you have going in this piece. It has a really cool feeling to it. I do like the trees a lot, but I feel that pushing the silhouettes a little harder would be beneficial. Its true that the light comes around the trees like that and causes something of a distortion, but even if that was exactly how it looked in reality I think you want to push the silhouettes further. There is almost too much information there for this kind of light.

I also agree with everyone else that the lower portion of the image feels quite disconnected from the rest of it. But what bothers me a bit more is that almost the entire composition seems to be pointing to the car, and I'll show you what I mean. You have a lot of diagonals and triangles pointing to a circular area which contains the car. This area is dead center in the image. On top of this the car is rather high contrast in comparison to its immediate surroundings. And the car is one of the weakest areas in the image, I probably would have left it out honestly. What I am saying is that the focus has become something that I dont think you wanted it to.

Here is an image of what I am talking about:




I have a bit more to say about it though. I hope you dont mind. Your figures are in an akward area of the composition. You have seperated them quite a bit from the rest of the image, and to bring them back into it I would make them larger, and have their silhouettes break to shoreline. This will avoid a bad tangency and keep them as something of the focus of the image. Which, you almost always want any figures to be. This also helps with some of the scale issues I think the image is suffering from. Here is a quick image I had to do without my wacom (away from home at the moment..so..mouse for the win). I moved the figures as I suggested, and brightend up some of the shoreline around the figures to make them feel a bit more encapsulated by the entire image instead of just the water. I pushed a bit more light onto the mountain in the far background to help pop the treelines more in the middle ground. I darkened the figures quite a bit to bring them even more extreme into the foreground. I put a bit of light value over the car to push it a bit out of the focus. The triangles and the diagonals are still negatively affecting the image I think, but I think it has a bit better of a feeling like this. Anyways, I hope you dont mind my butching your image like this. I think its really cool and its awesome you are doing something like this for your brother.

Here are some of the changes I would make:




Unfortunately this loses a bit of the color that originally excited me about the light. It would be tricky to find a good balance, but I just cant even begin to attempt it with the mouse like this. Sorry. Also, I wouldn't be afraid to work without your layers. You should maybe even give it a shot, because layers can be a real crutch. They slow you down and they can really aggrivate you sometimes if you are not meticulously organized. Besides, if you drew it once you can draw it again.

Brolo

Oh wow, Cakemikz you get <3s for that... yes I see what you mean for the composition - it makes so much more sense to have the figures as a more centered focus instead of having them dangle on the bottom.

Okay, I'm feeling inspired now... I'm gonna give it another go.

Aaron Lee

Cake made some good observations. He pointed out the subconscious reaction to the implied lines, and even though the atmospheric perspective kills some of the nice colors, it's more realistic and essential to drawing the eye to the more important aspects of the piece.

I think the brushwork could definitely use some more defining and blending. It's acceptable if you're just sketching and fleshing out the colors, but if I look at a piece and immediately see what kind of photoshop brush used then it just seems sloppy to me.

Saved

That's really pretty, rolo

Brolo

Updated with Cakemikz's suggestions and shinier, wetter water.

Also had to change the colour scheme to CMYK for printing, which hurts the sky a bit but gives me a better idea for how the final's gonna work.

thundercake

It looks so much better! This whole piece is so warm and vibrant and alive.

one thing to watch out for...on the figures, some of them seem to be lit with a light outline (like the boy on the left) but the shadow is falling towards us... there would not be a light there except perhaps on the very outline, and it would be a bit brighter. The water's reflection might throw up lights on the side in shadow but I believe they would be cooler, less intense and further down on the figures.

The water is painted very beautifully and is convincing, but I think the piece as a whole could benefit from sharpening in the foreground to give the piece more depth..especially along the silhouettes. When I get a texture like that from many layers of paint I like to use the eyedropper tool to pick up colors, then paint back over the area again to simplify it...this also helps to make it look more purposeful and sharp and new...the sky looks like this has been done, but the water looks a little bit old, like you had been working on it a very long time, and many layers had been built up. It has a certain fuzziness to it.

All around this is a really lovely and enchanting painting...it makes me feel happy...the atmosphere is tangible. If I would add anything it would be some fireflies in the darker areas on the shore, but I put fireflies on everything, so don't listen to me...

rts

Nice Rolo, looking good. I would still drop the contrast on that car in the background a bit though, it stands out a bit too much right now I think.