enviro, help from experienced enviro makers welcomed

[marco nelor]

hey guys. working on an enviro here..i could use some advanced tips(meaning..not just "hey it looks great")..any tips on using textured brushes...or picking colors...or using shaped brushes....

this is my first attempt....which im not sure if it works , i want to unite it with more environment color...but im not sure how to control my brush to create fog, or environmental lighting.
and for the second attempt, with my effort to add fog...bug, as u can see, i need a lil help

[Justin.]

I'm no enviro artist but 2 things right away; The composition seems a bit too busy, perhaps expanding the cnavas horizontally will give you more room. I think you should change the red light to orange, which is blue's compliment. The palms are really nicely rendered- but yeah, maybe just make it slightly longer, and possibly throw in small elements to give it some narrative? =)

Keep it up!

[Slash]

Hey, it looks great!


On the serious side, two things that i notice is the perspective on that thing on the roof, it looks off compared to the roof its standing on, the other thing being that some of the colors in the picture look a little arbitrary to me - like the very strong blues. I'm not quite convinced that all that blue could come from those small lamps. (I didnt notice those lamps at first, and i wondered where the hell all the blue came from.) I'm not sure the orange would be reflected in the water at that angle either. And i agree with justin that it's a little busy, maybe you could use some fog to tone down certain areas?

[Marty666]

I agree on the crits above, especially that it's a very busy image. To create some fog or atmosphere I use a very large soft brush on constant size with opacity on pen pressure. On a new layer add the color of the fog where you think the fog would be most visible (lit). The colour you use is most probably either the ambient light colour or some light source's colour. Afterwards erase back what would be in front of this fog layer. Do more layers if you want to be more accurate with the overlapping of fog and objects. It looks better if you use as few layers possible and only erase the fog on objects that are important to the scene (unless it's really thick fog, obviously). Around the lights also add some of the light's color in the fog.
Also use less contrast in value and colour for objects things further away if you paint them.

Hope this helps,
Marty

EDIT: Made a paintover as example. This one also has a layer on colour dodge around the lights. Use normal layers for the fog with ambient light and colour dodge layers around the lightsources.

[gorillagrin]

Hi Marco,

This is looking good so far. If you want to add fog, your best bet is to look up some photos to see how light diffuses through that kind of atmosphere. I did a quick paintover as an example, using mostly your purple background color with a soft brush at low opacity, building up slowly. With that kind of fog you're going to lose most of your darks, which you can save for your foreground elements. I toned down the lights in your bottom right corner too - I thought they might have been a little too distracting and pulling the eye to that corner.

I'm by no means an expert at environments but hopefully this will be at least a little helpful.

By the way, I love the way you handled the ferns or palm fronds or whatever that plant is on the left (I'm terrible with plant names). Would you mind talking a little about how you approached that?

Edit: Marty666 beat me to it!