Sunset Trip

[guskooyman]

Here's a piece I've been working on lately after putting it off for the longest time. I'll be posting my progress here. Any suggestions or advice is appreciated. I suspect the current palette might give me some trouble in the near future. And I'm not sure yet how to shade the rocks, but I'm working on that.

The piece is a triptych, so the three parts are meant to be viewed individually but also as a whole. I tried to reflect that as best I could with the composition. The three parts represent sky, land, and water. If anyone has any questions regarding the concept let me know.

Here it is:




Version 2:
I corrected some of the lighting, and works on the sky, grass, etc. I done for tonight. I'll post again when I have more progress.

[Mathias]

I'm glad you de-stylized the clouds. The rest of the scene isn't stylized to that level. Matches better now.

Is this a Japanese scene? I see the torii.
And is that supposed to be a dragon?

With the sun apparently on the horizon, should a moon be visible?

It's unclear what the grey mass is at the base of the mountain.

The overall image's focus is that water-dwelling thing. A catfish?

Brown thing to right of catfish could use some disambiguation as well.
Ohhh wait, that's a dead, swampy tree stump isn't it?

The ground cover plants/grass texture in foreground is oddly sparing. Your previous version's grass worked much better.

[guskooyman]

Yeah, the clouds I originally had planned just weren't gonna work. Nearly everything in the first version was just a placeholder though. I spent a long time just figuring out where I wanted things.

I did want it to have sort of a japanese style. That is a dragon up top, but it doesn't have arms or legs yet. I actually had to look up a torii because I had no idea what those were. I just wanted some architecture that would stand out a bit, so I came up with that.

I added the moon just as a design choice. I'm not going for 100% realism. If it ends up looking weird later I'll just remove it though.

The grey mass at the bottom of the rocks is suppose to be a cave with light coming from it. I realize it doesn't have much depth, and that probably isn't the greatest color choice. I'll see if I can do something about that later.

The thing in the water at the bottom is indeed a catfish. It's like the first thing I put in this piece and I haven't touched it in a while. The tree stump was put there just because I felt that space needed some sort of object. I just didn't have any other ideas.

As for the grass, I didn't really like the way it was looking before. But unfortunately I don't really like what I have know either. I'm going to come back to that when I have a better idea.

Anyway, thanks for all your comments! I've worked on this for a bit today, but it was before I saw this comment. I was mainly trying to make the rocks look better. Here's what I've got so far. I'll work on that other stuff before I post again.

[Manupix]

Good start, there is a nice atmosphere here. The bottom panel is my fave.
There are also issues

Composition: the rocks are a big problem. They take up a lot of space without much interest; they point exactly to the middle of the piece; they make up a big dark mass that isn't balanced by anything else in size and/or color/darkness (the left side boulder tries, but can't do enough).
The buildings are too small.

Light: I can't see the sun so I guess it has set, yet the houses cast shadows; the moon crescent points 90° away from the sun.
The rocks must cast a shadow on the ground too so that there should be almost no bright grass in the mid panel.
What bothers me most is the dragon light and color: since it is seen backlit on a bright sky, it should be mostly dark without much color, except a narrow bright sliver of sunset colored reflected light. References! Also it is far away enough to be somewhat misty (compare with the clouds).

Colors look good but there is one main palette problem: the reds are not connected to the other colors. Actually the whole palette looks like it's made mostly of separate ramps, you should work on unifying it.

[guskooyman]

I changed the right hand side so the the cave and stump are no longer there. The catfish now doesn't take up as much space. I also added the sun, and worked on the palette. I think the color ramps work fairly well right now. I'm not sure if I'm making very good use of them though.

I still have to work more on the dragon, and I have no clue how I'd go about making it look misty in the distance.

Here's what I've got right now, plus the palette. Still a long way to go. I work pretty slowly though.

[Manupix]

Better =)

The shadows should converge towards the sun (if any: buildings would obscure each other's shadow at such a grazing angle).
The moon is still wrong

The waterfall looks like paint because of the color. It's nice though. Water would be whiter.

Misty dragon: basically, the darkest color should be no darker than the darkest clouds at the same distance, if those clouds are thick enough. Look up aerial perspective.