My first landscape

[hawxori]

deleted :S

[Reaping]

At first you'd want to resize that quite a bit. In my opinion there is no clear focal point, and I also find the brushwork too messy and overdone. Perspective is also a bit off, the pillars in the back seems distorted :)

[Hazzard]

I'm only learning myself but here is some stuff the pros taught me.

Sketching. Sometimes if you have an idea in your head, it can help to do several variations of it with very small, quick sketches first just to sort out any composition issues and such. You can use this sketch as a rough guide for the painting itself.

http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/o/2010/259/d/9/d9c70b62b692bfddaa231a446f24ea4f.jpg

Brush economy. Try to tell as much as you can with as few brush strokes as possible. Early on in a landscape painting it helps to set out your shapes with big bold strokes. Custom brushes will help a lot with this. Allowing you to apply texture to your work easily with little to no fuss.

http://runfreakrun.com/sivut/gallery1/2dogs.jpg

Tonal Values. Set your canvas to somewhere around 50% grey... this will give you plenty of tonal space to work in. Try to avoid using whites and blacks (the extremes of the value range) until the very end so that you can maintain flexibility throughout that range to the very end. I like to do my paintings in greyscale first before doing a colour wash because I can be certain my values are correct throughout the process. The problem is that colour has a tendency to lie in terms of values and you won't notice until you make your painting greyscale.

http://dariocoelho./files/Image/085001-086000/85798/212_stream.jpg

Perspective. It always helps to have a perspective guide. This is where your sketches can be useful. It allows you to see exactly how to set up your perspective guide, how many vanishing points you need, where the horizon line sits and all that jazz.

http://www.detaildesignonline.com/contentimages/2-point1.jpg

Custome Brushes. Also try to put together a library of brushes for yourself. This will help you save time when you are speed painting. So if you want to place a forest edge in the scene you don't have to go and paint every damn leaf and branch, you can grab your foliage brush and glance across it and get a general idea that looks good and can be honed later on if you feel like it.

http://net.onextrapixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/DigitalpaintingBrushes.jpg

Lastly if you want to get good at this stuff, speed painting is definitely the way to go. So rather than paint a fully fledged, rendered scene every time focus on the basics. Composition, values, perspective as well as coming up with cool ideas. If you speed paint a scene every day (each one should take no longer than a couple of hours absolute max) you will notice an improvement very quickly.

Now all I have to do is take my own advice and we will both be laughing ^^

[self-epidemic]

Oh wow I love this! I really am so terrible at landscapes, I just aint good at the whole vanishing points thing, and depth, y'know?
Thanks for showing me this :)