Steampunk-ish clocktower practice tiles

[Pix3M]

This was made just for practice for a coming Ludum Dare Jam. A friend and I, both part of a team for that jam decided that we should make a random mockup with music that goes with it. I found some random noun generator and three of four words it generated were "mechanic, clock, and tower".  I went in a direction of a steampunk setting. This was an interesting challenge since I've never took a shot at a steampunk look. I can be better at this if I do and study steampunk settings more, but otherwise I'd consider this beginner's work.

So, I end up making something that might look like a puzzle platformer... valves and clouds of scalding steam and such.

I wasn't necessarily aiming for perfection and there are some mistakes I'm aware of. Clock face is heavily unfinished but left it like that when I realize there's more important stuff to focus on. Legs are under-rendered, and for some reason I'm having difficulty coloring the handwheel. The random circle on the tilesheet was supposed to be a gear but gears of this size seems pretty annoying to do.   

Anyways, I wouldn't mind having pointers to where my abilities with environments are at this moment in time.

[Facet]

Lookin' pretty good imo; clean, neat, if a bit sparse yet. I doodled out where I might take something like this cos it looked like fun. It is a bit hard to tell without the gnarly gears and stuff that we're looking at the back of the clockface. Aside from photos of the real thing, the Boktai series has a sweet clocktower, would be good to look at if you decide to revisit it.

The limited sepia palette is cool, but some brighter reds or yellows would make for a good accent colour/focal points imo. The pipes are higher contrast/priority than the platforms; shouldn't be a problem yet, but something to keep in mind in more complicated scenes. The girders I like a lot, but maybe try some cross-braces, tanks, valves, whistles etc. for variety.

For the mechanic's legs: you could try darkening the far leg, and removing the line on the sole for better contact with the ground, and really go for a more engaged-looking pose generally by bringing the limbs away from the body for a better silhouette, and to get some nice curves in there.

[Pix3M]

Hmm, not bad. Seems pretty silly that I never found a visual example of the cross braces when I searched for "steel I beam" on google images for getting through with this personal challenge. Well, I guess that shows my general inexperience with environments.

Seems that google images doesn't seem to be a great resource for references when you need them. I'm not getting anything obviously related to what you just mentioned about Boktai and a good reference of clock tower machinery. Got a link to a good screenshot somewhere?

[Facet]

All's I found was this for the Boktai clocktower just now, pretty but not masses of it; I seem to remember being pretty impressed, maybe there's more somewhere or maybe I'm thinking of something else, sorry! Found some nice photoref here though.

[Pix3M]

Intersesting photo reference. It doesn't even fit in one photo. 

I'll save that somewhere in my dropbox for times I wanna try my hand at something with lots of gears.