Hello! And crit request

[AeornFlippout]

Hey folks, first-time poster here. I've been looking for a community for critique and accountability for awhile, and a post by Noah Bradley pointed me here.

I make video games independently with my brother (we have a company called Flippfly) and we are working on improving our art skills.

I thought I'd upload a recent project of mine. I spent a few hours on this, and then just kind of got discouraged about the whole thing. I wanted to create a sort of ominous piece with oversize birds casually grazing near a village. But it came out looking pretty happy, and everything looks a bit plastic and not very interesting. I feel like I'm at a place with digital painting where it takes a long time to get any one area of a painting done, and I get exhausted and quit a couple hours in before I've accomplished what I set out to do.

Any suggestions would be welcome!

[Piotr Jasielski]

First issue would be perspective, you can find some tutorials regarding this matter on youtube. Second thing is the landscape itself - rivers usually flow in valleys, if you have a massive hill on the left side it would be more natural to have one on the right as well. Remember it's the river that carves valleys, not the other way around. Third thing - composition - you can also find some tutorials on the internet. It would be probably the best to apply the rule of thirds and place birds near the village as these things seem to be focal points.

Also if you want something ominous, it would be better to go with less saturated, darker colors. Best thing to do is to study some photos and learn from it.

[Amit Dutta]

Hey man, the major issue is definitely perspective. It seemed like you wanted to do two different perspectives in the piece; an orthographic 2.5d view vs a regular perspective view.

For perspective views you definitely need to learn the basics of how vanishing points work. Generally speaking all parallel lines will converge to the same vp on the horizon/eye level.  Learn how to set up, and use perspective grids to create consistent scenes. I have some info on my YT channel (in my sig) on setting up persp grids, but definitely do as Piotr says and check out books and resources on this.

Couple of choices are Norling's 'Perspective Made Easy' and Loomis' 'Three Dimensional Drawing'.   Someone is bound to recommend Scott Robertson's "how to draw" and while it is very thorough it gets very technical very quickly that I think is probably overkill for beginners.

Below in the first image, I showed with the red lines where converging lines in various objects in your scene should have met on the same horizon line, but instead go towards radically different horizon lines.

In the second image I just continued on the perspective in the hill, and you can see how orthographic it actually is, rather than being houses on a sloped hill.

In the last image I just did another scene entirely (pretty flat perspective really) to show how you might want to look at mood. As Piotr said, generally for moody scenes, less saturation overall, lower contrast and you can then pop out focal points with high saturation high contrast.

Choosing an appropriate point of view also matters for putting emotion in your scene. Viewpoints looking up give a sense of awe or feeling smaller or insignificant against the thing you are looking at. Looking down tends to have the opposite effect. I highly recommend a book called Framed Ink, which goes into some of this as well as being a great general treatise on composition.

[nutriman]

Also I'd like to add:
Try to put in more interest to your painting by avoiding big areas of one flat color.
Breaking them up with Hue Shifts, Gradations or Textures will definietely give more appeal.
The sky usually has also a gradation getting brighter towards the horizon.
Use aerial perspective to give the illusion of vast space.

Good start, keep at it!!