Digital painting critique

[JosephCow]

Hey Thanks Joseph! This paintover was exactly how I wanted to envision it! This is so sick and I realized I've so much more to learn. Those are really helpful pointers. I didn't really considered the underside of the rock as I wanted it to look massive in a really great distance and focused too much into that. I actually tried showing it off whilst im trying to build the initial shapes but for some reason it looked off so I scrapped the idea. I feel so overwhelmed knowing that there's so much I needed to oractice even after learning/studying extensively for 4 years. I guess I'm doing it the wrong way. As for forms I'm really already confident to construct anything from just my imagination with also a little help from reference but the problem is that I can't apply light onto something imaginary, maybe basic shading but to really feel the sense of believability is what I really have trouble doing. Maybe life drawing could help? 

Yeah no problem! I think with how the rock looks, it could work as you've drawn it if we are seeing it from a distance. But you have to remember that the horizon represents our eye level, so though it does depend on how far away the rock is, I would think it would look more natural a third of the way up the canvas or so.

4 years is a decent amount of time, but art has a huge learning curve, it's something that really does take years of practice before a payoff. So keep going, you might find with a couple more pieces to the puzzle everything will start to come together. In terms of doing it wrong, i haven't seen anything else from you so idk. But it would probably help to do some study of lighting and modeling staying close to reference. Life drawing, big yes. Light follows certain laws, so if you can figure out how it works more in depth, you can use it to make imaginary forms look convincing by sculpting them using light/dark to make it look like planes turning in space. But more than that, the lighting is what makes compositions fun and interesting so for environment stuff especially you wanna be solid.

I think painting a lot from life/reference was really good for me, but also doing form study from imagination helped a lot. Like drawing different forms in space and making them interact, constructing cast shadows, trying to logic your way through different lighting scenarios with basic forms like in darktiste's example. The only issue is that it's hard to know if it's right or wrong without someone critiquing it, since there's no reference. But it at least helps to figure out your blind spots, like you realize you don't actually know how something would work, and then you can investigate and find out how to do it. You learn more by solving specific problems that way I think than doing more general practice. People learn in different ways, however.