Forest Scene (WIP)

[breakfast]

Hi guys!

Ever since I registered http://www.pixelgirl.net as my website URL I've been meaning to update the backsplash image to something more, y'know... made of pixels. So I've been working on a forest scene I'm going to blow up large & use as my website background once it's finished.



I'm not 100% on the composition of it... Also not sure about all the color choices. What do you think?

[dpixel]

My first impression is I can't tell what the weather is like.  The valley and mountains look kind of misty.  On the other hand, the contrast between the trees and log against the foreground grass tells me it's somewhat bright out, but there's very few shadows.   Maybe some more shadows?  Maybe less saturation in the background?  The shade of green next to the river seems out of place.
Also, there's over 120 colors and most of them are similar greens. 

Overall, I like the composition and love your textures.

EDIT:
Check out some of Henk Nieborg's work:  http://www.henknieborg.nl/

[YellowLime]

Will it be scaled up to fill the screen?
Otherwise it would be a bit too small

[PypeBros]

You put nice detail in your texture, but it gives me an odd overall feeling, as if there were pillow shading on many place. Yet, when I look closer I do not spot pillowy places. Maybe your light source isn't sufficiently defined and the different element suggest it comes from different places together ?

[breakfast]

Hi guys,


Thank you for all the critiques! The weather is unclear because it's a mish-mash of a misty day in Switzerland I experienced along with a totally made up foreground. I'm having a little trouble making it look believable as you can see... I tried to make the light source more clear and added more shadows. Is it looking better now?

The color count is due to me accidentally resizing something with bicubic interpolation early on so it added all this ugly anti aliasing. I'm slowly working the color count back down.
Ignore the opacity change in the BG, haven't messed with it yet so the focus is just on the foreground ATM. And yes, it will be resized to be about 5 times larger on my website.

[Decroded]

I like this idea.

Bit of an experiment of bits of sun shining through the clouds since I been meaning to try this myself:

Also tweaked foreground colours a bit, more can be done.
You've clearly done lots of work adding detail which is nice but I think you need a stronger light source first.
The most effective texturing I've seen is done selectively when its implied by using the edges of light and shade, and ambient light.
I beefed up the warmth and vibrancy of the foregound but it should probably go further still if the background has some light areas.

Sounds like you're working in Photoshop so u could save a mask for the foreground layer so you can easily tweak (Image - Adjustments...) as you work.
BTW u can set Nearest Neighbor as default for resizing


Breaking out of pixel art just to illustrate the sunlight a bit:

I've seen something similar done done in pixel art, don't know the exact process but u could just cheat by sampling colours from overlay layers

[NaCl]

This is looking really good. Nice work.

In terms of improving it, I definitely think that Decroded is on the right track. The change in the level of detail is what I see as the most important thing. In yours, it felt a little disjointed seeing the foreground with a high amount of detail, and then everything else drops off to the smallest amount of detail, and none of it implies a light source at all. The detail he added to the one side of the river really takes it to the next level.

PypeBros also made a good point. On the whole, it looks kind of pillow shaded, except then you zoom in to see the details. I think it's because on the small scale the shading is all really good. But on the larger scale, there is no variation in the value.

Just as an exercise in shaking up your perception of the piece towards the overall picture vs. the details of it, I've grey-scaled, reduced the color depth, scaled down, and mirrored the image.



I used Decrodeds edit so you can see the difference between his background and your foreground. There is a sort of mono-value band running all along the bottom. Where in the background, there is a large change in value between the regions.

I'm not nearly as skilled as you, so take this with a grain of salt (hyuk hyuk). But you clearly have a handle on how light affects things. It is demonstrated with the log. Maybe try to apply that same process between all the objects in your scene, and not just within them.

Keep up the good work. I think overall your piece has an awesome feel to it.

[Decroded]

Looks like you modified the values somehow.
When I greyscale my edit I get different results.

This highlights how foreground colours (especially brightest bits) and textures need to be tweaked manually following tool assisted colour correction.
As a general rule I think where there is less light there is less texture so I only bothered with the sunlit area.
But the shadowy parts of the valley still deserve some suggestion of texture.

[breakfast]

Oh!! I came back to what I thought was a dead thread only to find I had actually received some super helpful advice! I apologize for that, after my last post in this thread I really didn't realize anyone else had made any replies. I actually just came back here to revive it one last time to post my finished work, only to find if I had seen your tips I probably would have a better looking finished piece here..

Decroded, your recommendation for the mountains and river highlights were lovely! Because I was combining an imagined foreground with a photo referenced background, I wasn't sure how to go about blending the lighting to make it consistent and believable throughout. Instead of adding more highlights to the mountain range and river I instead lowered the contrast and tried to add more of a slight Swiss Alps haze to the whole scene. It made it a bit easier for me to finish everything this way, but if I had seen these replies sooner I would have probably gone with Decroded's method of highlighting the background. Oh well, there's always another landscape to pixel next. :] Thank you everyone for the great advice and suggestions, I learned a lot with this piece!

[Decroded]

It looks beautiful 
If this is going on your website, I still think it could use a once over, mainly a quick colour update.
Perhaps try masking the whole foreground and mess around with exposure in photoshop or something just to up the brightness a bit.
This should take like 5 minutes and I'd suggest duplicating the layer each time you try some changes then flick through the layers to compare which had the best balance.
You might need to up the closest mountains slightly too so it all gels.

The tree on left looks "nice" but any artist looking at ur website will probably judge it by its lack of clear light source. You could define the clumps by using magic wand (contiguous off) to select all the leaves, eyedrop the darkest green and start painting some dark areas crescent shapes.
Then u build up your other tones over the top.
Then do the same with the trunk, keeping in mind the top should be mostly in shadow, u can have some mid - tones there but the highlights look strange right now.

You could also redo the clusters in the tree leaves as the round shapes and pillow shading makes them look like puffy balls.
Try not actually rendering every every leaf, rather make each leaf a solid shape of green. Don't stress if every leaf isn't defined from the rest of the clump as this can actually look good, then u can go back and sparingly add single pixel shadows and the odd highlight.
This is less important as it's more like pixel artists that would notice that sort of thing.

EDIT:
I really should be studying so messy rush job (no Wacom available :-S) with lots of balancing and hues to fix.
Just wanted to give some ideas to create more "wow factor", especially if this is to go on your site.