Alright, I'm in over my head again. Can someone help me understand how sunlight works?
This is a fairly small piece, so I'm open to go crazy with special effects. But I'm thinking I should probably do the light rays in layers, and I want to get the castle right before I move on to anything closer.
I guess the shadow from the castle doesn't really make sense, right? I'm out of my league here and I can't really find any good reference pics to understand how light works in a scene like this.
I would say there are two important elements here
* Basic relation to the lightsource, ie. basic value structure. I'd say you captured this fine.
* Reflected light. Large objects reflect more of the sky color, especially on upward-facing surfaces, and indirectly on surfaces that are at ~70-90 degrees to large upward-facing surfaces.
I think you might be going for
crepuscular rays there. The current depiction makes sense in an iconic way; if you want to be a little more realistic, be aware that they normally
appear to fan out rather than being at a constant angle.
OTOH, it's far enough into the day that I'm not sure that crepuscular rays would show up noticeably.
Anyway, here's an edit. Not super confident of the locations I picked for the edits on the mountains -- should have used a ref -- , but I'm pretty confident in the building edits.
Also I pointed out a few locations that have pixels that don't really make sense to me.
EDIT: Friend's reply reminds me that the castle roof should probably be bluer+more desaturated. The roof of the small tower would probably be less affected, which might be enough to allow you to easily keep that mostly-imaginary line you are drawing between the red tree and the orange roof.
Also I noticed the second shadow of the red tree, which is strange. I think you might need to adjust it -- most of that shadow would fall on the side of the hill which we can't see. (placing a shadow here also draws the mountain and tree together in space (->more similar in value) , which I find odd from a logical perspective)
The large triangular shadow from the castle seems to exhibit the same problem now I look at it, including drawing the large cloud and the castle together in space. My own sense of space says that the shadow would fall on the lower, smaller cloud, but not on the larger one. (and it would perhaps follow the contours of the cloud somewhat, but not doing so can be excused as a stylistic choice as long as the overall volume has enough resemblance)