Hey guys, i'm trying to decide between some thumbs at the moment, the idea is a near future set of floating cities, post apocalypse. A person makes it there after a huge journey (thats him slumped over the boat in 5 btw). The top right sucks badly, but was hoping if you could help me out with which you think would work best.
I like 4,5,6 personally, 5 because you get more narrative and i like the angle, 6 because you get a nice sense of depth and 4 because i like the sense of scale you get.
These places are guarded, hence the watch tower in 4 and 6.
Anyway, tell me what you think please, im keen to crack on with it :D
Cheers.
These are looking nice! I think you've got a cool idea going here and you're doing a good job of controlling your values and not getting too caught up in details.
I think the main thing I would focus on is a bit of cleanup and a bit of refinement. I think you're doing a good job of exploring different viewpoints and arrangements of the elements in the scene, and now the key is going to be taking them a step further and really resolving some of these compositional challenges.
Here's a few thoughts that might help, and I've attached a paintover for #5 (not saying you should go with #5, it just caught my eye as a good one to work on). So, a couple points:
1. Minor thing, but I would recommend making some nice clean borders around each thumbnails. Right now yours are bleeding in to each other a bit, which isn't terrible, but having each thumbnail contained in their own space will help you see them more clearly. At least it does for me, might be worth trying. :)
2. I think one thing that's going to help a lot with a scene like this is pushing some interesting perspective in to the mix. They're all fairly 1pt perspective except for #3, and I think if you exaggerate it a bit you'll get more of the feeling you're going for. In my paintover I widened the angle of the lens a bit and rotated the boat so it's going in to space towards the city, rather than flatly to our right. Also making it bigger to fill the space a bit and give us a nice closeup on the character.
3. After your general shapes are in place, which you've done well, I think it's important to go in and refine some of the shapes in to what they would actually be. Even though it's just a "thumbnail" clarity is very important, because when you show your thumbnails to a client they might be getting opinions from game designers and marketing managers who have no idea how the artistic process works, so although everyone on this board knows what these thumbs are an uninformed person might not be able to read them. So, in my paintover I tried to refine what you already had in place for the city to help clarify what those elements are.
At the moment, these thumbs are pretty strictly compositional and could be turned in to a number of things; fantasy castles, steampunk towers, sci-fi spaceports, anything. So I tried to add in some elements that would give the viewer context clues as to the genre; smokestacks, X-pattern metal girders, windows in the tower so you know it's a skyscraper, but it's got this weird circular cutout shape so it's probably a little more futuristic. Think of these things not as details, but as information; if you start painting wood grain on the boat or carefully rendering all the specular highlights on the water, then you're getting in to unnecessary detail. But if you are adding things that help tell the story to the viewer then you're still within the purpose of a thumbnail. Even if it takes you longer to get this information in, 30 minutes, an hour, 3 hours on one thumbnail, time is irrelevant because thumbnail doesn't mean "fast painting" but rather, "simplified painting".
So, I think you've got a great start, and I would recommend taking another pass over all these thumbs (or your favorite 3 if you think you're pretty settled on them) and see if you can resolve them a little bit further and tell the story a little bit clearer. And if you need to do more or try different versions of one, that's totally ok; my composition teacher said thumbnailing is like sifting for gold, you're going to throw out a lot of sand but if you gather enough some of it is bound to be good!
Yah lots of good advice already given...I just wanted to reiterate the one point. The more you nail the main issues in the thumbnails, the less you have to work in the render. Each thumb should have a more or less clear indication of value, mood, composition, focal points, perspective and lighting. Anything after that is a pure rendering exercise. Do the hard yards up front your workflow will thank you for it.
(07-04-2013, 09:02 PM)monkeybread Wrote: Yah lots of good advice already given...I just wanted to reiterate the one point. The more you nail the main issues in the thumbnails, the less you have to work in the render. Each thumb should have a more or less clear indication of value, mood, composition, focal points, perspective and lighting. Anything after that is a pure rendering exercise. Do the hard yards up front your workflow will thank you for it.
Yes some great points made :) Some of the focal points in the thumbnails were a bit confused I think, the one I've gone with was the most clear I decided, though I hate it to bits :/
Need to make more of a habit of doing thumbs as well as silhouettes for my characters.
Cheers for the comment!
So this absolutely sucks. I hate it to bits, but I dont know how I can make the water look decent, how to make the sunset not look way oversaturated and false or how to generally make the piece work. Any help would be much appreciated!
I tilted the camera to give it a more dynamic feel, hopefully it doesnt come across slanted or weird.
Cheers.
(07-03-2013, 02:48 AM)Andantonius Wrote: These are looking nice! I think you've got a cool idea going here and you're doing a good job of controlling your values and not getting too caught up in details.
I think the main thing I would focus on is a bit of cleanup and a bit of refinement. I think you're doing a good job of exploring different viewpoints and arrangements of the elements in the scene, and now the key is going to be taking them a step further and really resolving some of these compositional challenges.
Here's a few thoughts that might help, and I've attached a paintover for #5 (not saying you should go with #5, it just caught my eye as a good one to work on). So, a couple points:
1. Minor thing, but I would recommend making some nice clean borders around each thumbnails. Right now yours are bleeding in to each other a bit, which isn't terrible, but having each thumbnail contained in their own space will help you see them more clearly. At least it does for me, might be worth trying. :)
2. I think one thing that's going to help a lot with a scene like this is pushing some interesting perspective in to the mix. They're all fairly 1pt perspective except for #3, and I think if you exaggerate it a bit you'll get more of the feeling you're going for. In my paintover I widened the angle of the lens a bit and rotated the boat so it's going in to space towards the city, rather than flatly to our right. Also making it bigger to fill the space a bit and give us a nice closeup on the character.
3. After your general shapes are in place, which you've done well, I think it's important to go in and refine some of the shapes in to what they would actually be. Even though it's just a "thumbnail" clarity is very important, because when you show your thumbnails to a client they might be getting opinions from game designers and marketing managers who have no idea how the artistic process works, so although everyone on this board knows what these thumbs are an uninformed person might not be able to read them. So, in my paintover I tried to refine what you already had in place for the city to help clarify what those elements are.
At the moment, these thumbs are pretty strictly compositional and could be turned in to a number of things; fantasy castles, steampunk towers, sci-fi spaceports, anything. So I tried to add in some elements that would give the viewer context clues as to the genre; smokestacks, X-pattern metal girders, windows in the tower so you know it's a skyscraper, but it's got this weird circular cutout shape so it's probably a little more futuristic. Think of these things not as details, but as information; if you start painting wood grain on the boat or carefully rendering all the specular highlights on the water, then you're getting in to unnecessary detail. But if you are adding things that help tell the story to the viewer then you're still within the purpose of a thumbnail. Even if it takes you longer to get this information in, 30 minutes, an hour, 3 hours on one thumbnail, time is irrelevant because thumbnail doesn't mean "fast painting" but rather, "simplified painting".
So, I think you've got a great start, and I would recommend taking another pass over all these thumbs (or your favorite 3 if you think you're pretty settled on them) and see if you can resolve them a little bit further and tell the story a little bit clearer. And if you need to do more or try different versions of one, that's totally ok; my composition teacher said thumbnailing is like sifting for gold, you're going to throw out a lot of sand but if you gather enough some of it is bound to be good!
Great work, can't wait to see the progress! :)
Fantastic points, thanks very much. Have taken your advice as well as continued with no. 5 as it had the most clear focal point. I tend to make quite confused thumbnails without too much information in there so thats a great point in making sure the concept is actually there in my thumbs.
I kind of wanted to tell the story by having some foreboding guard towers in no. 5 but I had no clue where I could fit them in. I wanted a promising but also slightly ominous feel to the place which I'm not sure I captured.
In any case, thanks very much for the feedback you made a lot of excellent points I'll keep in mind! :D
