Stone Church

[jahasaja]

Working at a snails pace on updating A Bastard's Tale. Not enough time..

Here is a Church. I tried to make stained glass windows but I am not sure how they turned out. Also, The church bell looks a bit off.

[Night]

I quite like the overall look and feel of the piece, however there are a few things you should take note on:
- the bell's perspective does not match the church's perspective.
- the battlements on the bell tower seem a little weird, I'd suggest to either make the tower bigger and keep the battlements (imagine you'd want to get up there), or replace them altogether with a roof.
- it's quite noisy, try to make parts like the shadowed walls and grass with one colour or two.
- the stained windows (and bell for that matter too) look a bit too desaturated, although I reckon this may be intentional and quite unnecessary I'd suggest to brighten them up a bit.

After creating the edit I noticed you use quite a lot of colours everywhere even where they probably should not be, take a look at the wall near the grass I've edited in my image.

[jahasaja]

Hi Night,

Thanks for the edit! some great help.

I tried to add some of your ideas to the piece.

I tried to change the top of the bell tower. Not really done yet. But perhaps something like this.
I took your colours for the stained windows they looked much better.
I also used your bell with some small changes  for now. I plan to animate the bell later.
I also removed the one colour from the shadowed wall as your edit. The grass has to stay the same since it is already in the game like that.

[jams0988]

I'll never understand it when people say "I don't know how well this turned out." Does it look good to you? Does it look like what you're trying to represent? How can you expect to draw anything if you can't even decide whether or not what you're making is ugly/unrealistic or appealing/realistic? =P
In my opinion, they didn't turn out very well. I can tell what they are, but they look nothing like any stained glass windows I've ever seen:



The bright/saturated effects you're showing in your picture only show up when you're *inside* the building. From the outside, natural sunlight kind of takes over. Your windows feel more like in-set posters than glass, to me. Of course, pictures don't need to be realistic to be good. I don't find the style very appealing either, though. You should try to *suggest* details more, instead of just drawing every detail in. Right now you're like "well, this chuch is made of stone. Better draw *every single stone* on the church!", but if you look at some photos of churches, you'll see that stones blend together more or less in certain areas, depending how much the stones have eroded together and stuff. Lighten up some of those dark lines between the stones, and see how it looks.

Your glass windows seem to be somehow less reflective than the stone walls surrounding them, which is one of the main things giving them a very "painted wood" texture, instead of a stained glass texture. Just take a look at some photos, and good luck.

[jahasaja]

Thanks for the input jams0988. I think I very often feel that I am not sure how something looks. To a lesser pixel drawer as myself I often second guess my intuition.

I tried to do some changes as you suggested. both with the stone and the windows. Here is a new edit.  I am still not sure how the windows turned out 

I also made the bell smaller.

[jams0988]

I think it looks better. I like the new colors more than the old ones. You still haven't done anything to break up the stone texture, though, so it still looks very repetitive and noisy. Here's a very quick edit to show you what I mean:



Now, all I did was take the "replace color x with color y" tool in Graphics Gale, and I used it to very quickly and crappily erase some of the cracks in the wall, while adding darker spots to others. Don't take this as something you should copy - please go find some better references than this - but take note of how much less monotonous the wall looks when it isn't one giant solid pattern.

You should study some references, and copy exactly what you see. When you draw from reference, don't fall into the trap of thinking "okay, this is a stone wall," and then letting your imagination fill in the blanks - you'll end up just making things up instead of learning. For textures like these, you might even want to pick a very small part of a stone wall or whatever, and copy the photo *exactly* to the best of your ability. Even trace and use the color picker, as long as you're thinking about why your reference photo looks the way it does.

[Gil]

There's quite a few problems with the construction of this. The bell is not centered, the perspective on the floor plan is wrong, the roof is not centered, etc. You should draw some construction lines to correct this.

Here I drew some crude green lines, notice how almost nothing lines up, this building doesn't make a lot of sense and would look really wonky if we were able to walk around it.

[jahasaja]

Thanks Gil!

I tried to give it better perspective. Not sure about the top of the tower though..

Also, made it smaller, tried to make the stones less clear as Jams0988 suggested (thanks for the edit Jams), made the shadows more prominent around the windows, and tried to make a shadow from the tower.



final version: