Space Battle (WIP)

[TheJBurger]

Continuing in the vein of posting your work early before you realize that the composition is screwed and it's too late to change it, here is a piece that I was working on for fun.

(SKETCH STAGE)


This picture was inspired by the space fights in Battlestar Galactica, and as such, most of the designs are roughly based off of it, or my memory rendition.

In case you can't tell what's going on, the ships in the foreground are human fighters going into an epic battle between the human cruisers (long submarine looking things) and the enemy battle stations (the... spinning top looking things).

Right now I am worried about the composition mainly. I wouldn't consider the designs final, but more of a general idea right now. Also, I was wondering if I should switch to a wider lens, like that you would see in a movie, but I just stuck to what I know best, which is 320x200.

I'm afraid I've also kind of lost interest in it after initially making it, but I hope I can complete it.

[Dualnames]

Wow.

[auriond]

If thar's a sketch, I really want to know what the final version looks like!

[Domino]

TheJBurger, are you really George Lucas posing as somebody else on these forums??

Nice work, very nice.  Good luck with finishing it.

[Sparky]

Damn you, now you've got me wanting to go draw space ships when I should be working on my homework!

I like the style of it, it's very dense and energetic. I like the arcing lines instead of straight for weapons fire- I hope that makes it into the final version somehow. Maybe they can be missile contrails instead of beams? I've never watched any of the Battlestar Galactica shows, but I'd say don't worry about copying the original designs accurately. Just draw spontaneously and it'll be much more interesting than a slavish immitation.

Composition-wise the top right seems the most interesting to me. The left battle station also works pretty well, I can really feel that it's closer to the camera than the right station, and the two feel like they're aligned along the same plane.

I like the top left cruiser and the accompanying smaller ships, but I think the small ships to its upper left could use more size and depth variation. They don't look as three dimensional as the small ships to the lower right of it.

Overall I'd say it'd be a great piece to finish, and I for one would love to see an edit.

[Jens]

That looks very good, TheJBurger! Nice design and arrangement. I can almost see all the movement in that picture. I've noticed that the big submarine-like spaceships look like they were lit from above. I would have thought that the brightest light comes from the fighting below: the explosions, missiles and such. (Here's a messy edit in which I've changed the lighting (and coloured it a bit) to show what I mean.) Just a thought tho. I'd like to see the finished version, too

edit: oh and the left laser thing of the human ship in the foreground seems to be a bit out of perspective, I think

[loominous]

Since you have a lot of artificial bright light, the main lightsource (which I assume is a sun), could be used to accent the edges, and create interesting shapes by cloaking large areas in darkness. Backlight, in other words.

So what I did was to simply erase large parts of the ships so only the edges were left (which would be the only areas exposed to the main lightsource), and let the engines pop out with their intense brightness.

This not only creates more interesting shapes, as they were all pretty similar, but also increases the contrast, while not changing the remaining values, as you simply get rid of the bridging mid tones.

To attract more attention to the center, and to make it more interesting, I created a planet of sorts, which could be exhanged for a large ship or something, just to get a big new shape in there. A also increased the contrast by adding a bunch of dots representing shots/beams or whatnot, against the ship that' mostly cloaked in darkness due to the new light setup.

At the same time I pushed away the upper left corner, which doesn't provide anything really interesting, and seemed to simply steal focus. The backlight helped, as the shapes were reduces to thinner lines, and I also toned them down.

I also added some galaxy like dots in that corner to provide some variation.

Atm there's still some issues with interest in the center I think, but this could simply be solved by some nice detail and colour contrast, particularly if you keep the planet, which could have a contrasting atmosphere colour and surface.

Good luck!

Edit: cropped it to reframe around the center ship and refined the sloppy erasing a bit, that had pulled alot of smaller detailed along with it.

[Andail]

Yes, Loomy's got some good points here. I wasn't too impressed with the original sketch (having seen other art by you); there's no real plan to it, no lightsource or sense of depth, and the brush strokes tend to just sketch out luminous patterns instead of three-dimensional shapes.

[TheJBurger]

I like the style of it, it's very dense and energetic. I like the arcing lines instead of straight for weapons fire- I hope that makes it into the final version somehow. Maybe they can be missile contrails instead of beams?

Unless I'm not interpreting you correctly, that's exactly what those lines are supposed to be: missile contrails.

I've never watched any of the Battlestar Galactica shows, but I'd say don't worry about copying the original designs accurately. Just draw spontaneously and it'll be much more interesting than a slavish immitation.

While I do think this is a good idea, I think references would help me a lot as my mind can only throw out boring box shapes right now.

I've noticed that the big submarine-like spaceships look like they were lit from above. I would have thought that the brightest light comes from the fighting below: the explosions, missiles and such. (Here's a messy edit in which I've changed the lighting (and coloured it a bit) to show what I mean.) Just a thought tho. I'd like to see the finished version, too

edit: oh and the left laser thing of the human ship in the foreground seems to be a bit out of perspective, I think

Yes, thanks for both your points. I had considered it, but I was thinking of using a dual light source; one strong light from a sun off to the left, and a lesser light source coming from the battle explosions.

Thanks for all your points loominous. Yes, I intended to use a sun off to the left as the main lighting source. I also intended to have the explosions cast a secondary light on some of the ships, but would this be a bad idea since it would reduce contrast between the lit parts of the ship?

Yes, Loomy's got some good points here. I wasn't too impressed with the original sketch (having seen other art by you); there's no real plan to it, no lightsource or sense of depth, and the brush strokes tend to just sketch out luminous patterns instead of three-dimensional shapes.

Yes, well thats why I'm here in the critics lounge. 

Well, thanks everybody for all the comments and critique. I'm working on an edited version which will hopefully be done in the near future.

[loominous]

Yes, I intended to use a sun off to the left as the main lighting source. I also intended to have the explosions cast a secondary light on some of the ships, but would this be a bad idea since it would reduce contrast between the lit parts of the ship?

I think it would be nice to keep the parts of the ships not hit by the sun dark, though I overdid it to get the idea clearly across. With the edit's light setup, the larger parts of the ships are basically invisible, which is kind of dull. So some secondary light or just some detailed ship lights/details in those areas would provide additional interest, and if subtly added, the contrast could be maintained, since the darkness/low contrast in those areas would make the details pop out well without competing valuewise with the sunlit parts.

I think it all depends on what you want to focus on. A darker setup would work well if there was some central area to attract attention. If there's nothing more to focus on, then the ships need to be really interesting, in which case a more revealing setup seems better suited.

[TheJBurger]

Added a bunch of stuff (color, stars, bigger explosions), changed the foreground ship design a little, and made all the changes loominous suggested.

I feel like there's something else I need to work on in this picture but I can't figure out what.

[ThreeOhFour]

I think I know what it is you need to work on.

Giving your skills to me...

This is wonderful.

[Buckethead]

I think the spaceships could stand out a little more. For the rest I can only hope that by touching your image on the screen a little bit of your magic flow over to me 

[loominous]

I think the colours could be more exciting, so I added some more variation and gave it a kind of retro like look.


Colour Theory as applied in this modification

Since colours can be a bit confusing, I thought I'd present the alterations, and the reasons behind them, in a pretty elaborate manner:

So, the available hues are:



The upper left ones are considered the cool hues (Blue, Cyan, Green), and the lower right ones are considered the warm hues (Yellow, Red, Magenta).


The original:

The original contained pretty much only Reds to Yellows, which covered the explosions, shots and a decals. This can be enough for an image - it's pretty common for movie posters - but this one seemed like it could benefit from more variation.


The edit:

Before adding any completely new hues, I started by broadening the existing warm ones. Featured were reds to yellows, but the reds were more of orange reds, so it was missing both neutral reds, as well as magentas.

To fix this, I simply turned up magentas in the darks and mid values (using curves, explained here). What this did was:

I) kept the yellows intact, since these were present in the bright parts, which the magenta add didn't affect.

II) changed the reds, which had been orange reds, to neutral reds.

III) introduced some mild magentas in the darker warm parts.

Put simply, in case the above sounded a bit technical, we now had redder reds and some magentas, in addition to the original orange reds to yellows.

So this simple fix broadened the whole warm spectrum, giving a richer look.


Adding cool hues

Since the image now featured all those warm colours, they could be balanced out with some cool ones (blue, cyan, green).

The most predominent areas beside the warm parts (the explosions etc) were the greys of the ships. Since the warms were so well represented, these areas seemed like the best candidates to compete.

So I made the sun emit blue light, instead of white. Doesn't make much sense, but hey, it's sci fi.

So I coloured the areas lit up from the back left in cool colours, ranging from neutral blue to purpleish blues, depending on their value (more purple the darker they got).

Missing now were: Cyans and Greens.

Since I wanted to increase the focus on the centre, I gave it a slightly green colour, which makes it stand out against all the reds and blues.

So, I was down to cyans, and not many places left to add it, so I made the engines of some of the fighters emit some cyanish flames, and applied it to some of the larger ship's openings.


Some other stuff:

I reduced the brightness of most of the stars, as they seemed simply distracting.

To increase the focus on the centre, and to accent the silhouette of the planet, I added two brighter space areas.

Probably something else.

-

If anything seems unclear, or contradicting to anyone, don't hesitate to ask.

[TheJBurger]

Wow, thanks for the edit. I really like what you did with the red gunfire and changing the engine colors to cyan. However, I have to be honest, I'm not too fond of the somewhat purple-ish factor of the lighting on the bright areas.

I edited it with a couple of color layers and one curves layer for the redish sections, but for some reason that curves layer decided to darken the whole picture "tearing" dark sections into pure black. I tried to fix it manually.



I had a couple of questions:
- Back in your first edit I was wondering what exactly the glow around the planet was. Of course I assumed it was the atmosphere but it just made me curious because I had never seen it drawn separated from a planet like that with a gap.
- Regarding your color scheme, how often should you try to include the whole range of hues when making pictures? All the time? Only when using warm/cool contrasting colors?

[loominous]

I have to be honest, I'm not too fond of the somewhat purple-ish factor of the lighting on the bright areas.

Yea, I noticed that now when I looked at it on this monitor. While I did add a lower magenta boost, it wasn't intended as that intense.

This is more like what I had in mind:



More of a subtle lower warm boost. The whole magenta tone is to make it retro like. Makes me think of older game box art for some reason.

I edited it with a couple of color layers and one curves layer for the redish sections, but for some reason that curves layer decided to darken the whole picture "tearing" dark sections into pure black.

Still have that layer, so I can look at it? Remember that what curves does is let you change the "brightness" of individual channels, each RGB channel being a greyscale image. So if you only want to change the colours, you need to set the curves adjustment layer to 'color', just like you would if you wanted to do an ordinary 'color' layer.

I was wondering what exactly the glow around the planet was

That was just my hasty rendition of what I recalled an atmosphere looked like. Probably way off.

Regarding your color scheme, how often should you try to include the whole range of hues when making pictures? All the time? Only when using warm/cool contrasting colors?

(Off topic, could you phrase those sentences as "how often do you think one should..."? The current phrasing makes me sound like an oracle or something, which, while stroking my ego, makes me rather uncomfortable, as I'm just a happy amateur like most here)

If done carefully, I would think most images would benefit from it. I think the important thing, if you like moody palettes, like me, is to keep it subtle, and the ratio very uneven. So to take the current image as an example:

- Perhaps 85 percent of it is dominated by the two main opposing "colours" (even though they are gradients with several hues, it feels like you're looking at blue or orange areas)

- The remaining 15 consists of some other hues to provide richness. These aren't pure colours, but tints away from the main "colours". Put in pure green in this one and it'll look crap.

The warms are probably less dominating in area space, but they compensate for that their contrasting values.

I think it's like composition. Two equal halves are boring, and it only gets interesting once you start offsetting things and counterbalancing. So I think in general, two dominating opposing main forces, comprised of several sub elements (hues for instance), coupled with additional seperate small ones, to provide richness and interest.

[TheJBurger]

Still have that layer, so I can look at it? Remember that what curves does is let you change the "brightness" of individual channels, each RGB channel being a greyscale image. So if you only want to change the colours, you need to set the curves adjustment layer to 'color', just like you would if you wanted to do an ordinary 'color' layer.

Yeah I think I might've forgot that color part. If you want the layer, I guess I could email it to you.

(Off topic, could you phrase those sentences as "how often do you think one should..."? The current phrasing makes me sound like an oracle or something, which, while stroking my ego, makes me rather uncomfortable, as I'm just a happy amateur like most here)

Haha, sorry. I'm never sure how to address you. I'll keep that in mind in the future.

Well, thanks for answering my questions.