(WIP) Newbie Trying To Pixel An Island

[Decroded]

Haha its starting to look like a magical wonderland.
try swapping the middle and right mushrooms and shift the positions to make it all a bit more random.
currently it looks more like someone planted them in a row (mushroom orchid?).
When are u going to paint over that nasty paper in the background??
Takes like 10 seconds to do if u use magic wand to select ur beach and grass then invert the selection and paint with large brush...

[Wanyo]

Decroded beat me to talking about the positioning on the large mushrooms! 

Something bothers me about the flower patches, they end up looking more like sprinkles, maybe they need to have a little more color variety or get intertwined into the land formations more, or perhaps be less uniformly spaced. I can't toss an edit right now but take a look at a couple of these references if it gives you an idea of what I mean:
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5342/9503984856_d19df4017d_c.jpg
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/5650398.jpg

[Wallie988]

@Wanyo
Ok, I tried fixing the flowers. :3
@Decroded
Yay! It actually looks like a magical island! I tried fixing the mushrooms, and as for the background, it'll probably be staying until I'm done with the whole island. xP

[Decroded]

Flowers were bothering me too had no time to comment.
I think you need to thin out and rough up the edges of the patches so it looks more more natural, or add some dirt and colour arrangement if its a planted garden.
have u considered putting the mushrooms in the middle of the flowers? Dunno if it will look any good but worth trying.

[Wallie988]

@decroded
How about this?:

It's a bit more purple now...

[Decroded]

Are you going to fix the lined paper background?
Or is that part of your theme?
It just looks bad right now and really distracting from the island.

You need to spend some time cleaning up the pixels of the flowers and I think the ridges of your slopes are still too "literal" (is that right) instead of suggested, so that takes some time to mess around with removing highlights and blending the shadows in a bit more.

With the flowers - when you've got that much detail (lots of per-pixel colour variations), combined with high saturation and high colour contrast with surrounding grass, it starts the dominate the whole image.
So try bringing down the colour contrast (NOT overall image contrast, I mean hue and saturation) of the flowers themselves so they're not so hardcore.

Mushrooms could use some help.
They're a bit blobby, especially at the base.
I think the ground needs shadow around the mushrooms and the stalks need stronger contrast and shadow being cast from the top of mushroom onto the stalks.

I don't like how the cave is twisted to face directly at the camera.
Just changing a few pixels will make it follow the natural angle of the cliff (bring the left side up a bit and right down).

[Wallie988]

@decroded
Ok, I'll fix the background now since I have to move on to the rest of the islands for at least a while (if not, this is probably going to take a year).
I'll fix some of the things though...
Is this what you meant by that?:

[Wallie988]

@decroded
YES! Found a way to remove the background... which one's better?

[Wallie988]

Ok, sorry, this took a while, but here's the other "island" that I've been working on...


Does everything look right so far? There's supposed to be a river and waterfall flowing down from the top cliff, but I have to find a way to add some kind of city around the river. :3

[FRAWG]

I would, on this new island, play with more natural, flowing shapes rather than geometric cylinders.

It's always helpful to do a little sketchy stuff first.
And I know, there's about a million lighting and structure problems in this edit, I just wanted to show a little bit of an idea on how the newest image can be developed.
I just felt that this towering structure deserved buildings to emulate the overall height of their foundation. It also helped to remove a bit of the stair-stepped geometric look by creating an almost triangular structure. That and some basic shading (with a bit of faulty lighting, my bad) to emphasize some areas.