Need some suggestions and crits

[jmorris]

I've been messing around with corel painter (9) for some time now...I always feel like I spend way too much time on things and I can't seem to push them past a certain point. I'm 21 attempting to major in illustration. Suggestion and crits please! Also does anyone know a good dvd tutorial or something else addressing creating skies and clouds??

[jinxtigr]

Isn't your rendering a lot better than your underlying form? That can cause that problem. I'm noticing that your rendering of water is incredible but it doesn't fade off into the distance with the correct perspective, and the rendering of the car is fantastic but its tire is flat or not mounted properly (and there's something funny about the overall shape of the car, again in the perspective)

Could that be it? That you're mastering the rendering issues but sensing a problem with the underlying shapes? The great thing about that is, if you can improve the form, you're already a whiz at rendering

[jinxtigr]

To explain- it looks like the angles of the wave-tops are much the same close up as they are in the distance, and they would become sharper and cover less area as they recede because the water dynamics will be the same.

Likewise with the cities of the first picture- one must surely be farther than the other, but the rendering cues and sizes say it's exactly the same. The sides of the spaceship/zeppelin/thing don't recede either so it loses a lot of size cues that way.

And with the car, the front tire has no sidewall ) and the back tire does though it is very low profile ] plus the top-back of the car has a bit of a bulge that maybe doesn't need to be there (a faint point just above the center of the side window) and the left-side mirror doesn't sweep back as much as the right-side one.

It's hard to notice these things because the rendering is so distractingly impressive

[jmorris]

Thanks I totally agree with everything you said... it's interesting to see if self critiques match other peoples'. The car I think looks off mostly because according to my perspective if you looked at it head on it would have to be extremely wide. The zeppelin, crashed thingy's biggest problem is, well, looking big. It sort of looks flat and not very larger and I want it to look huge! I'll fix the cities the ones in the back should be way smaller. I want to add two small figures in the foreground to push the size but I usually like to do that last

[jinxtigr]

If it's a crashed zeppelin there are some things that are going to be true-
-there's going to be some kind of texture on its surface which will be altered by perspective, so at the edges you'll be looking at it edge-on
-there will be some kind of lighting- the cities say the lighting is coming from right behind the zeppelin, over the hills, but the rubble says it's from the left of the picture. Either way the zeppelin will have the same sort of highlights as cities and rubble, which right now it doesn't. However, if it's behind the zeppelin, the highlight might be very tight and confined. Large soft basket-weave highlights aren't really saying 'zeppelin' very much.
-the rubble was produced by the zep crashing, not put in place to prop up the thing, so rather than having been packed IN around the zep, technically they have been blasted OUT from that point...
-the biggest problem with the zep looking big is that it's not anything like a mechanical form. A zeppelin is sort of elliptical, and the trick is that especially to get a sense of HUUUUGE the line has to be as tightly controlled as if you were drawing squares and boxes- it's NOT a blob. On the bright side this could be over-drawn without too much trouble, treat it as a rough-outline or blocking-out of the masses but don't treat that zep as guidelines! If you can draw a huge box in the right position, and then fill the inside of the box with an ellipse also in perspective, it would show you what shape the ellipse has to be.
Even people photographing real things that big and blobby (like the Hughes Spruce Goose, for instance) have had trouble getting size cues to happen, and they were photographing REAL things so don't be too discouraged because you're attempting a hard thing