Tiny castle landscape

[Friend]

I toyed with a few ideas from my post above  *shrug*  changes in cloud detail kudos  to joecreates 

[Gil]

Friend's edit is going in the right direction. Direct sunlight is VERY bright and it tends to overpower the lit parts, even bleeding into shadowy parts.

My somewhat crappy try to introduce over saturation and bleeding:

[DatMuffinMan]

I don't really have the time for an edit (maybe later, sorry cels ), but hopefully this makes sense:

Your sketches always have this outline feel to them, even though there are none, and I think it's because you only pay attention to clusters inside of an outline. I may be wrong, but to me it really seems that you outline a shape, floodfill inside of it, and then add clusters/detail as needed. For the buildings, it works great, because the lines are straight anyway so it's not as noticeable. But for the trees and clouds (foreground + middleground), the shapes just look unnatural.

a3um's edit to your previous piece on PJ sorta showed this point as well - whereas your houses in the BG focused on having each outline drawn correctly, he focused more on the overall atmosphere of the bundled wet rooftops.

[Friend]

gil, that how you did the light was what I was trying to achieve.  Your edit is so..illuminating 

I dunno, I love gil's edit, but now the castle competes too much with the tree.  I still think the background elements have too much saturation, so I played around some more with colors.




a second edit for fun...your pieces are fun as heck to play with. 

I actually found this second edit to achieve a better composition.  In my opinion, an inherent dilemma in your piece is you have the two biggest pieces of interest close to both edges of the canvas....If both are competing for attention, it is almost head ache inducing to try to take in the image b/c your eyes try to gravitate towards both edges at the same time.  When the lightness is turned up and saturation down on the left side, I think it achieves a few things: grander scale, makes you feel higher up, makes the castle seem more like you are discovering it since it melts into the environment, and the eye is not inclined to go to both edges at the same time


it'd be nice if pixelation had a neutral forum color...

[cels]

WIP here.

@JoeCreates: Thank you! That's a very helpful edit indeed! I've tried to get rid of some superfluous colours now, but I see you also changed the hues here and there, and I will take a closer look at that as I progress. Good call in regards to the layers and the AA. I've started adding a little bit more depth to the clouds and I'll add more in time.

@Friend: Thanks a lot for the edits! Unfortunately, you seem to be taking the piece in a direction where I'm not keen on going. It may partially be down to screen calibration - I feel like all the purple and teal makes it look very C64 - but it's also a matter of deciding how dense the clouds above would be and how strong the sunshine would be by contrast. I do want them to be strong, but I don't want it to go too far, to the point where it's reminiscent of Independence Day

I really liked the vibrancy you gave to the foreground though, and I have tried to incorporate that bit. I also think you've made the sunrays feel more three-dimensional, and I'll take a closer look at that.

@Gil: Direct sunlight is very strong, but it's also a sliding scale. It depends on a lot of factors, so I'm hoping to find a balance I'm comfortable with. I want the sunlight to break through the grey landscape and add colour, I don't want it to drown the castle in an explosion of light. It depends on how much of the sunlight the clouds are blocking out and then whether there's a clear opening for the sun to shine through, or just some parts of the clouds that are a bit thinner.

Compare this and this with this, for example. I feel I have some freedom to play around with the colours, without going too far with the contrast. I don't want the sunlight to eat away all the colour from this piece.


For example, I want the sunlight to really bring out the colour from the grass around the castle, and not turn it grey. Maybe my version needs a bit more blue, a bit less saturation. But I'm still thinking that the sunlight should bring out the colour in the grass.

I appreciate your help, I hope I don't sound very defensive. I'm just trying to make sense of all this, while not making changes I don't understand.

@DatMuffinMan: I actually don't have that sort of workflow at all. I almost always paint with a big brush to make blobs, which I later refine. Buildings are an exception, but everything in this picture was painted with a big brush first, and then refined. The tree, the hills, the clouds and the mountains. I think the last time I drew something by outlines was this piece.

As for unnatural looking shapes, it's hard for me to comment or correct myself without getting a more detailed explanation. I definitely think I often make mistakes in drawing three-dimensional shapes. I'll keep working on it. I'm not done with the tree in this piece though, I just stopped working on it once I was confident I knew how to pixel it. I have a messy workflow.

[Ai]

@Friend: Thanks a lot for the edits! Unfortunately, you seem to be taking the piece in a direction where I'm not keen on going. It may partially be down to screen calibration - I feel like all the purple and teal makes it look very C64 - but it's also a matter of deciding how dense the clouds above would be and how strong the sunshine would be by contrast. I do want them to be strong, but I don't want it to go too far, to the point where it's reminiscent of Independence Day

I think I get the idea of the teal (making intermediate colors more saturated than the 'top ranked' color creates a faded-but-with-haloing look) but it's too strong IMO, so I guess I agree with you there. It feels poster-y.

I really liked the vibrancy you gave to the foreground though, and I have tried to incorporate that bit. I also think you've made the sunrays feel more three-dimensional, and I'll take a closer look at that.

In terms of 3dness, I think you might actually get a better effect on the tree if you restrict the strong lighting to the top (and possibly left) rim. Putting plenty of it on the surface facing the viewer doesn't make too much sense to me (Crepuscular rays are shadows, right? cast from the opposite horizon, with light filtering through in some gaps? Then most of the light on the tree surface the viewer can see should be indirect light only, since those faces are pointing away from the light source.)

For example, I want the sunlight to really bring out the colour from the grass around the castle, and not turn it grey. Maybe my version needs a bit more blue, a bit less saturation. But I'm still thinking that the sunlight should bring out the colour in the grass.

Well, that's a matter of relative color imo -- if you want the highlighted areas to look clearly colored, knocking down the saturation on the darker shades will create saturation contrast that aids that impression. Increasing hue contrast (that is, the amount of distance along the hue spectrum between your darker colors and lighter colors) will also help.

@DatMuffinMan: I actually don't have that sort of workflow at all. I almost always paint with a big brush to make blobs, which I later refine. Buildings are an exception, but everything in this picture was painted with a big brush first, and then refined. The tree, the hills, the clouds and the mountains. I think the last time I drew something by outlines was this piece.

I've tried both of those methods, and I think they're both a little problematic (too messy vs too fussy). I think what is more optimal is probably something that allows the definition of lines and volume at the 'same' time. For example, with Grafx2, if you could have contourfill assigned to one 'color' and continuous draw on another, and when you swap colors the tools swap accordingly, that would allow you to flip between them as needed, keep a balance between 'volume' structure and 'line' structure as you build the image.

Currently I have a kind of workflow that draws lines with one color and fills in with another. It's a little more work but allows me to deal with both aspects promptly.

WRT that tree, I dug up a few refs that express some things about the color that I think are not quite right currently
1,
2

Taken from a google images search "red tree in fog"

* lighting on trunk is.. probably too well defined. In an open area there will be more light, but it seems like most of the faces are opposite the lightsource -> get mostly indirect light.
* too much direct lighting with no apparent cause (like I mentioned above)

Maybe these search results are excessively misty, they do seem to match with the 'basically no direct lighting' idea though.

This search has some interesting results in the first page that might be useful.

[Gil]

Oh, I don't mind the defensiveness at all

What I try to do with edits is pick a conceived weak point and push it to the logical extreme. It's then up to the author to decide if he likes that direction and pick a comfortable in-between. It also helps with the dreaded "the edit is so close to what I wanted, I don't feel like continuing myself".

Trying to iteratively nudge stuff towards what you want can result in a really bad workflow and it's a common mistake, which is also something this style of editing helps combat.

So yeah, my edit is not meant as a "you should do it this way", but rather as a "if you do it this way, this is the extreme"

[cels]

Made some further changes to the castle, to the forest, to the grass and the tree. Still haven't refined the mountains, the clouds or the overall palette.

I added some yellow grass, I don't know if it stands out too much. Someone once criticized me for thinking too naively about colour, colouring the sky blue and grass green without any deeper understanding of colour. I thought that was interesting, so I'm looking to challenge myself a little bit here. Maybe I should challenge myself more in that regard in the future.

@Ai: In regards to the tree, I think of the foliage as a semi-spherical object, being hit by a beam of light. And the light source is almost directly to the side of the viewer. If I only highlighted the edges of the foliage, this would suggest the light source is behind the tree. As the foliage is semi-spherical, it makes sense to have plenty of light on the front left side, as seen from the viewer, I think.

You ask if crepuscular rays are shadows. My understanding is that they're basically beams of light (light reflected off moisture and dust in the air) contrasted by space with less light. But I don't quite know how to show that correctly. For example, I was very unsure about the dark space below the tree's foliage, or the diagonal shadow I originally had from the castle. Because a shadow doesn't work the same was as light. A shadow isn't visible in the air. If there's a bright snow-covered mountain in the horizon, and a big building in front of it, the building shouldn't make the mountain look any darker. The shadow would only be visible on the ground. On the other hand, if there's a lot of dust and moisture, then all the air will be reflecting light, except where the building is blocking the sunlight. So in that sense, crepuscular rays are shadows. And I suppose, in that sense, it makes sense for the space beneath the tree to be darker. Maybe I should bring back the shadow from the castle, now that I think about it.

Thanks for making me reflect on this.

In regards to workflow, I've seen plenty of good artists work with my method, which is why I moved away from using lines in the first place. But I also notice that different artists have different methods, regardless of their talent. E.g. some people draw people using the blobs which are later refined, other people draw skeleton-like lines that are later covered by muscles and tissue and then clothes.

In regards to reference images... well, it's really tricky to find images that show exactly what I'm looking for. And it's very easy to be misled by Google Images, because sometimes you simply can't find good examples of what you're looking for. If you look for a red moon, for example, you will generally find the most red moons out there, as people tend to upload pictures of nights when the moon was really, really red. They may also upload images that have been filtered or photoshopped to make the moon look extra red. The same goes for red trees, fog, rainbows, etc. You'll find a lot of extremes and a lot of photoshopped / filtered images. I may be wrong, but I think both of your refs are photoshopped.

Thanks for doing the searches for me. I try to use Google Images the same way when I'm looking for refs



@Gil: That's actually a very smart and constructive way of doing edits, now that I think about it. I've previously tried to shy away from extreme edits, as people may instantly reject them because they're too far away from their original vision. But as I've come back to your edit again and again, it's grown on me. And I think I'm moving toward a compromise I'm comfortable with.

Now the question is just if I've managed to find a good compromise or if I'm falling between two chairs.


Also not sure if I have enough contrast and the right balance. This is where it gets tricky for me.

[Ai]

The more highlighted version of the tree seems more sunrise-y to me. (and the bottom right version in your later image. It's hard to look at for long, but that's part of what makes it feel sunrise-y)

WRT light mixing, blender is a nice tool to get some ballpark estimates of what eg 'grass in blue lighting' works out to look like. Though admittedly you need a little experience to handle certain materials correctly (eg transparent plant leaves or skin need a familiarity with subsurface scattering settings)

My observation of the refs I collected was that the effect gets stronger as you approach the horizon, so far away objects show more obvious shadows. I may have to review that though.

[Friend]

I hope you dont mind a did another edit.  Like I said, your pieces are so fun to toy with because of your drawing style.

on your current edit I'm digging the high contrast, at least in the tree area. 
(also I just want to say you know better than I do, and I hope I dont come across like I know what I'm doing xD  I'm really just throwing ideas around and having fun at the same time.)