Work sample; desert background

[.]

i think the house on cliff and the cliff are little too far/too small

[Reptile]

Wow, one day I want to accomplish this level of artistic amazingness. 

The only thing that bugs me is the shadow of the big rock or mountain side:



You notice the green bits are perfect, but the red bit is not really in perspective of the sun and other shadows.

[Andail]

Thanks reptile
And yeah I get your points. I guess I was a bit affraid of over-doing the shading, and it ended up a bit weird in some places.

hm, colect12, too small/distant for what? Your personal taste, or some sort of perspective relation? Please elaborate a bit.

[.]

Well i think that the cliff looks like its far but if you make the thing in green round a little farder it would be good
http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/Canyon.bmp

[DoorKnobHandle]

colect12, please don't post BMPs and I really don't get what you mean...

farder

you mean farther, right?

[.]

Yes, i am sorry my english isn`t very good

[Snarky]

I think colect is seeing the cliff with the church/monastery/whatever as a continuation of the foreground. This is probably the biggest issue I have with this image. It's just not clear what we're looking at, and various details give different cues. Are we on the edge of a cliff? The crest of a hill? On a plateau that stretches to the peak in the background?

[Andail]

Ok, well, I'm not sure there's much I can do to help you there. The painting is based on a sketch drawn by chapter11 studios, and this is simply what it looks like.

I do hope, and believe, that most people will recognise that the cliff with the building/monastery is situated farther away than the plateau with the skull; the very plateau the viewer is standing on.

Some pictures are complicated I guess, and it can take some while before they're interpreted correctly. Thanks for sharing your points, though.

[Reptile]

Any of sharing some tips on backgrounds? You've done an amazing job.

[Snarky]

I didn't realize you were basing it off a pencil sketch. That's interesting.

I found the sketch on the company's website:



I agree with other comments that you've done a very good job coloring the image.

You have made a few changes to the sketch, and I find that some of them contribute to the problems I'm having interpreting the image. For instance, the outline of the ground in the foreground is much thinner in your version, and the way you've drawn a cliff edge doesn't make sense with the direction arrow (you're supposed to go over the edge of the cliff?).

Some of the lines seem a little smudged. It would have been nice if you had been able to preserve the pen strokes of the sketch, not just their outline. The colored screens at Chapter 11 do an amazing job of this, which I imagine is quite difficult. It might be possible to add the sketch (after cleaning it up a bit) as a multiply layer to your colors, perhaps.

Another criticism I was going to raise, but which I see now isn't your fault, is that the shape of the building is very complex and "noisy". This contributes to the feeling that it is close (too much detail for something so distant), and makes it difficult to read. Specifically, having the cross in front of the building doesn't work for me. It would be a much clearer shape if it was in silhouette against the sky. (That's what Bill Tiller is always saying, anyway. Everything should be recognizable just from its silhouette.)

[Haddas]