The Last Crusade

[Mabus]

Picture for a book cover illustration.

Title: The Last Crusade

[kev ferrara]

This is a pretty cool photo-composite picture. It would make a nice editorial illustration of a really depressing article.

[0kelvin]

Nice piece, I like it.

I would bring one of the mushroom clouds closer. All three are kinda the same size right now and it's would be more visually interesting if they weren't all the same distance from the viewer.

I like the rebar cross. Nice image with a strong silhouette. Although, it looks more painted than the photomontage stuff, particularly the concrete it's sticking out of.

The dusty clouds are washing out the foreground a bit. The car and the garbage on the ground should have more contrast to them. They're receding into the background compared to the building on the right, which has much darker darks.

Lastly, the red signature stands out a bit too much.




Eric

[Earendil]

Hope this helps!



Also, if these are 3 nuclear blasts going off at night under a cloudy sky, I still think the foreground would be wayyy darker than it is right now. The hood of the car looks like it's being lit by an incredibly bright moon, or daylight, which would be fine since there is a very bright nuclear blast right behind it, but then there's a pile of rubble that isn't casting any sort of shadow on the hood of the car.

Really think pushing the backlighting and silhouette's would help this! This kind of general grey/blue wash light that's hitting everything in the foreground doesn't make sense if we've got three incredibly bright explosions of energy going off in the background. Push the contrast. Let's get way more darks in the foreground.

[Aurelyx]

I'm kinda sad when I look at this, cause the rendering and editing prolly took you some time.

You have no clue about composition unfortunately.

You've made a piece with warm colours in the background and cool in the foreground. Warm brings object forwar, cool colours makes your objects recede. You managed to do the opposite. Those 2 are really messing up your piece, but you should have thought of that before you started your image, I'm not sure how easy it is to fix that.

You split the piece up by the rule of thirds, but that only works if there's actually nothing totally throwing of the balance like the iron cross in the front.

There are 2 main events in your piece, the cross and the explosion, it just throws you off and no one will know what your piece is about really.

The way you make line and place your objects is completely brutal. The eye can't follow one object or a line. It gets thrown from one object to another.

Your negative space curses with the explosions which aren't drawn on the skyline but which are just randomly placed.

Well I hope this helps, but you really need to learn about composition before you randomly edit a picture together.

[Blue]

The hand drawn and the pasted elements in this piece really contrast each other. With the car so crisp and clean, and the clouds so last minute tossed in, it hurts the whole image.

Also you're mixing for blue and red leaves much to be desired. The posters above me have made a lot of fantastic points, so I'm going to avoid being redundant.

This is interesting subject matter and uniquely put together, but all of the inconsistencies makes this a car without wheels. I don't know about your deadline, but most of the problems in this can be fixed with some clever editing, and use of the color adjustments tab in photoshop.

Keep us posted

[Duman]

Its a very cool, and you have got some very helpful crits so far. I would try to add a small amount more color to the sky, minor stuff, and the far right blast looks a little mishapen. This piece has a great theme, and looks very cool, with a few minor tweaks, it could be amazing.

[Mabus]

Thanks for the critiques. Here is the redo. The pic is for front and back book cover so the left side with nuke and car will be on the back and the right side with nuke and rebar cross will be the front..