First Landscape: (phat update)

[Sirio_Brozzi]

This is my first landscape attempt on photoshop. The relationship between these two figures is that theyre brothers, and that theyre looking at one another. (its based off a real life picture)

Ive run into a few problems. Its still pretty rough, but I know I need some help in a few areas. The background, especially the mountains, Im having a really hard time indicating any type of atmospheric perspective. I dont know why..but I cant get it to look right. Im wondering if its my choice of colors.

Please tell me if theres anything else amiss. (Im sure there must be quite a few).

[Kenny_Callicutt]

I can tell you now its not your color choice its the value structure and secondly after that the intensity or saturation of the color.

keep in mind with a blue sky like that the further off in the distancethe more blue things wll become until they grey out into blue completely.

it also looks like your painting on one layer which for painting an enviroment was propably a bad descion. your trying to tackle it all at once and its going to be more than you can handle.

all i can tell you to do to seriously improve outside of the crits your gonna get on this peice is to either do some plein air painting or second best gettyimages or google landscapes and copy the pictures and simplfy the values to really try and understand how to push things into the distance etc. yadda yadda yadda. go paint and draw some more.

and practice your anatomy..

you didnt do all that bad at establishing depth

[Gilead]

The way the trees all curve inward and the mountain bulges in the center are the fish eye effect from your camera lens. This is a classic case of putting too much trust in photography. The foreground figure is too elongated probably for the same reason. The forearm should be about a head length.

Don't do too much texturing in the mountains, keep them kinda flat. Use a lot more of the sky color to give it atmosphere. After all what you are trying to show is that there is some sky between us and the mountain.

It would be nice to see more of a unifying color. Say if you had taken the dark reddish brown like in the shadows of his shirt and had used that as a base for the trees and the ground and the figures. Then build up the green branches on top of that, and build up successive layers of rock color so you dont have to use outlines. Even the clothes and skin could all be built up from that dark color. You'd find that it is less work than starting light and trying to shade everything.

Looks good though, keep going.
You've got a sort of gorilla face happening in that mountain, see it?

[Necronomicouch]

Its a mountain gorilla! *badumching*

Are you using the "real life picture" as a reference for the background as well? If so, may we see it? The best advice I can give you is to study a few photos that show the same depth you're trying to accomplish and see how the atmosphere affects the colors. I wouldn't even consider it cheating if you sampled the colors from the photo and applied it to your own image to get a realistic color palette since surprisingly sometimes colors aren't exactly as they look when in context. You'd be surprised how different your "best guess blue" color is not at all like a real sky blue...happened to me a few times. As was mentioned, things get more blue as they go off in the horizon creating sort of a "fading" effect.

[Aran]

If your painting a background it might be fun to experiment with throwing paint down onto the canvas and creating a background from this.
This was a typical style of leonardo Divinci's backgrounds and enspired some surrealist painters as well.
And if it doesn't work to well, you have the experience of throwng paint around which is a joy in itself

[Sirio_Brozzi]

Updated version:




Ken: Thanks for pointing out a few things, especially the fact that items get closer to the color of the background as they go into the distance.

Gilead: I really hadnt noticed that..But yes, I hadnt paid attention to the distortion created by the lens. I went back and fixed a thing or two regarding the issue. I applied a few things about the background(good info). And yeah, im sort of wishing i had started with dark values and built up into light...Its a pain doing it the other way around. Definitely something to keep in mind for future pieces.

The gorilla face is a nice unintentional touch. Thanks for the help so far.

Necronomicouch: Yeah, definitely noticed i had made the blue a tad different than what i thought it was supposed to be. Im going to go back and sample a few pics before the next update.

Aran: THanks for the tip..Im going to give that a shot.

[Sirio_Brozzi]

Bigger update. Made some changes so theres some obvious interaction between the two figures. Next: The background..