Snow Fortress

[deep_city_lights]

Created this tonight for a commission, would love to hear any ideas on how to improve it? I was going to add some characters into the scene to make it more interesting but I'm not great at people.

[Alex.Zelenski]

Im kind of getting a feeling that, that fortress is massive; but, it i'm unsure. That could be remedied by, well, im sure you know, but adding something that people know for size comparison, this could just be some dark silhouette of people walking on the hill/mountain on the left side of the image . That would be cool and maybe add some snow blowing around just to create depth and all that

[snacks ex machina]

The lack of atmospheric perspective bothers me. The details, textures and colors on the distant and high-up mountains are just as vivid and defined as the stuff in the foreground.

[David_a_ray]

Ok, here’s my two cents.

Adding people would be a bad idea. This is because you’ve made the fortress look smaller than I think you meant it to look. So, unless you fix that, it’s going to seem wonky if you add people. There are two reasons for this.

One: You add really small people, and the scale/ perspective is going to be wrong.

Two: If you add people in the correct perspective, it will destroy your composition.

You can’t simply rely on having people in the scene to give everything scale. You have to determine the scale of the buildings as well, and you have to show it.

So, in my little paintover here, I’ve made the door much smaller, and I’ve made the torches smaller, and put the much closer to the ground. This indicates the general height of the person who may come around to change out the torches. Hence, you have a scale reference.

As your current piece stands, the guy who changes the torches out would bump his head on the door of the fort. This makes your fort look laughably small.

[Chris Sanders]

this is cool, however i think some trees and holes punched in the large cloud could be in order.

[StephenJ]

I like it alot...but it seems more like an outpost then a fortress.

[deep_city_lights]

Thanks for all the feedback guys, really helpful ideas there. I think when I hopefully go back to this in the future I'll try and change the clouds a bit to make them more interesting + rectify the scale like you said. Good ideas.

[EagleGrove]

I think that it looks more like an outpost than a fortress as well... I think you need to make it more impressive for that and make it seem more focused on defending that pass rather than being the temporary home for a few sentries. Placement would help, since fortresses are never randomly placed anywhere. They always are in the most advantageous position possible (river bend, highest place on a mountain, blocking a valley etc) for their function.