Dunes

[Nitrogen]

Hey everyone, this is my first post and first attempt at pixel art, so crits are welcome, but go easy on me!

So after browsing the forum, I was inspired to try my hand. I wanted to do some dunes, so I found this reference image.



I made up my own dithering algorithm for the sky, looking to improve on that, and the moon looks wrong but I cant seem to fix it?

[surt]

Looks promising. Reminded of Dune II, which was nice.

Your sand is yellow, your sky is blue and your shadows are slightly reddish. The shadows are lit by the sky light and so their colour should be influenced by the sky, in this case toward blue, unless the sunlight is so strong as to overpower any hint of skylight, inwhich case the scene as a whole should be much higher contrast, with the shadows nearly black.
Some examples.
Your reference looks to be in the middle of a duststorm, hence the lack of sky light and also looks to be CG so probably not perfectly realistic anyways.

Antialiasing at the ridgeline between fully lit and full shadow need to be mush stronger, it's barely detectable at the moment.

One problem with the moon is that it appears to be lit by a different sun. The angle of its lighting would place the sun well below the horizon whereas the lighting on the dunes places the sun a little above the horizon.

My edit, probably went a bit overboard with the blue.

[Nitrogen]

Ah you're right..  Desert shadows appear to be purplish. There's a lot of blue light from the sky, but there's also a fair amount of reddish light bouncing off nearby lit dunes.

And the moon is of course facing the wrong direction, I wasnt thinking...

Thanks for the crit! Will try to address these later