C&C on forest road

[hedgefield]

I know it's been along time since you heard about TMC, so I'll go ahead and show you the reason why:



The next scene involves a foresty setting, a cabin/cottage sort of house outside New York (you guys do have forests out there, right?). This background has been a real pain in the arse. I usually use picture reference to build my backgrounds, but it's really hard to properly outline/cartoonize foilage. So I gave up a while back and just drew it myself.

It's the first real drawing I've made with my tablet (apart from a drawing of a woman), and I found it's pretty useful for rendering trees and such. After the coloring I've been implementing textures for the bushes and the road and such, but it still doesn't feel...right.

As I see it, there's a few issues:
-The lighting (it's coming from a lamppost of-screen)
-the perspective?
-the grass and the road still look pretty crappy.

Got any pointers?

[LGM]

I think the big problem is that the road is sharp, but as you go back the blurring in the trees and grass is grossly apparent.

[InCreator]

Oww, this is bad.
The trees look very good, which I cannot say about everything else, especially the grass! Since it's your style - complete overhaul wouldn't work, there's very little to help with, so

* This horribly smudged area between two roads has to go.
* The grass looks like you whipped it together in under a minute! Since it's handdrawn, I don't understand why you picked so non-grassy green and didn't just use color picker to get green colors from bushes? Total palette change and lots of redrawing required here.
* The tree in the middle looks magnificent, though the one far right looks way too flat. Add more dark tones (black color?) to it's rightmost side to make it rounder too. Also, I suggest heavy darkening on it's lower part.
* I'm not familiar with your artistic abilities, but there must be a way to blend smaller road into bigger one! I mean, colors and contrast, they're too different right now. I suggest desaturating the smaller road (filter it to black&white) and HEAVILY darken both roads.

I like the composition though, in game, this room/scene would surely feel interesting.

[Vespr]

I actually quite like it - the black lines on colour look as if you're aiming for a comic book style even if that wasn't your intention!

As for the shading, if the light is coming from a lamp-post, the shadows should be cast down on the ground and quite harsh instead of diffuse. Of course this depends on whether the lamp-post is an old-fashioned weak one or a modern one, and also on how tall it is.

The blending between the roads doesn't actually need to happen - the road closest to us is a road for cars and presumably made of bitumen. The little one winding into the woods is a footpath (I assume) so it wouldn't be the same texture or colour as the bitumen one. So my suggestion would be not to blend them at all. Make a distinction between the major road (like the edge of the bitumen) and the dirt road.

If it looks too harsh, you can drop in abit of dirt where the two roads meet, as people walking in and out would tramp mud onto the major road. If the smaller road is a driveway, use tiretracks that lead out onto the major road and fade away.

[vict0r]

It looks like you switch between handdrawing and "computer drawing ". The trees and grass dont look like the graphics from the rest of the game. Maybe try to do something about that. *offtopic* What paint program do you use?

[hedgefield]

Thanks for all the comments, I can work with this.

-Indeed the small road is a dirtroad, but it's still a seperate texture, so blending does need to happen. Same goes for the transition between grass and road. The reason a bit of the road is blurred is because I distorted it from another picture. But it looks crap so I'll have to redo that later.
-The blur between the trees is supposed to be depth blur. I got a little lazy drawing the rest of the forest, so I just crosshatched.
-As I said, the grass is shit. It's more of a filler, since I know I could never render grass realistically with a pencil. I'll need textures.
-I use photoshop CS 2.

P.S. Increator, did you get that idea for your avatar where I think you did?


to be continued...

[EDIT]
Quick fix

[InCreator]

As I said, the grass is shit.

Bullshit. Look at this!

P.S. Increator, did you get that idea for your avatar where I think you did?

I have no idea what are you talking about

[hedgefield]

Holy shit in fact! Thanks for that.


*It looks almost exactly like a logo tryout I made a while back. It revolved around a boba fett statue(dont ask) that I shone a flashlight at. The outcome/first draft looked almost exactly like your avatar... But nvm this spin-off.