06-24-2013, 05:01 AM
Nice sketchbook! Your latest WIP is looking really nice, the design of the ship is cool and you're capturing the time of day really well with your colors. The values and composition is working pretty solid too!
For a little crit, I think what's hurting the most in this piece right now is the clouds. They feel pretty organized and contrived. I've attached a paintover to help explain what I mean; essentially the issue is that each cloud is basically identical in size, shape, and spacing. When designing anything, especially natural organic things, you want to design them with variety in mind. A good way to think of it is the Three Bears rule, which is pretty self-explanatory: you have a large, main element, a smaller secondary element, and an even smaller tertiary element. You can then arrange these any way you like, but having that in place automatically creates focus and dominance.
This is handy because you can use it to your advantage compositionally, which I tried to do in my paintover by placing the largest, brightest, and most saturated cloud behind the focal area of the ship, which helps your eye get started in the right place. So I think if you fix that it'll help the overall composition a lot.
The only other tweak is I pushed the blues a little bit more in the shadows to get that reflected light from the sky really vibrant in there, which you may or may not want to do, but it could help sell the lighting. Other than that I think it's just a matter of refinement and polish, if you get the rest of the piece up to the level of the ship I think you'll have a winner on your hands! :)
Great stuff, keep it up!
For a little crit, I think what's hurting the most in this piece right now is the clouds. They feel pretty organized and contrived. I've attached a paintover to help explain what I mean; essentially the issue is that each cloud is basically identical in size, shape, and spacing. When designing anything, especially natural organic things, you want to design them with variety in mind. A good way to think of it is the Three Bears rule, which is pretty self-explanatory: you have a large, main element, a smaller secondary element, and an even smaller tertiary element. You can then arrange these any way you like, but having that in place automatically creates focus and dominance.
This is handy because you can use it to your advantage compositionally, which I tried to do in my paintover by placing the largest, brightest, and most saturated cloud behind the focal area of the ship, which helps your eye get started in the right place. So I think if you fix that it'll help the overall composition a lot.
The only other tweak is I pushed the blues a little bit more in the shadows to get that reflected light from the sky really vibrant in there, which you may or may not want to do, but it could help sell the lighting. Other than that I think it's just a matter of refinement and polish, if you get the rest of the piece up to the level of the ship I think you'll have a winner on your hands! :)
Great stuff, keep it up!