WIP 'environment' critique please!

[loppi]

Hi! I've been working on this on and off for a few weeks now. I didn't plan it out as well as I should have and I've been having issues with getting the depth that I want. It also feels like something is off with the colours but I can't put my finger on what.

I'm trying to go for a detailed yet loose style where only the focal elements of the foreground are rendered sharply (i.e. the ship thing in the front) and the brush work is looser in the background, but I can never seem to get the balance right. It just looks flat and weird to me. I'm not shooting for realism but I want to give it a sense of mass and space.

Please go ahead and critique the hell out of this... I'd love to be able to finish it. Thanks for your help!

[TinyBird]

I find the values kinda problematic. If you turn the image to grayscale, the shiny metal parts of the ship pop up, but all the values in the houses (and red parts of the ship) are very similar and they get really easily mixed up together and lose much of any depth.

[loppi]

Ohhh I see! I do seem to struggle with values. I find that if I add too much contrast into the background though, everything just merges with the foreground. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong in that respect.

Thanks Tinybird! (I just realised you're NightmareHound too... HI!!)

[krysjez]

Maybe ramp up the atmospheric perspective even more to help with the sense of space.

[TinyBird]

Yeah I too would add more atmospheric perspective. I actually have no idea what time of day is going on here (the windows look like it's night but then the plane is lit like it's sunny and so on) but here's couple rough examples:

They're still pretty busy but I added the sharpest shift in contrast as well as the largest area of bright white to the ship and background so that the ship would work as an immediate point of interest.