Some advice needed

[niphree]

Hello,
I was trying to work on something for Illustration of the week (Secret Tower). Since my result isn't good enough I will not post it in the finals but I would really want to get some advice on what is wrong and what I could fix.

I think that I have done something wrong with colors, I tried to change it but without any results.

Basic idea is that this is a tower, that can only be seen trough some magical/special glass.

[J.R.Hollis]

I had to read your post to figure out what was going on haha.

I would think that since I'm the viewer hanging the glass to see the tower, I would be peering through this glass. Thus the focus wouldn't be the same in the areas around the glass. And depending on the glasses' color or condition the values would also be different. Your glass is crack in several places, things would look pretty skewed.

I would also move the hand forward down the composition more, so that its clear that this is my or someone's hand near by.

[Stoat]

Oh, man...go easy on yourself! That's a neat concept, but you've chosen an impossibly hard way to convey it. Multiple strings hanging off of and tying together pieces of glass and those weirdly hovering fingers -- maybe somebody could sell the image that way, but I sure couldn't. I would never have guessed what I was looking at without the explanation.

How about a thumb and forefinger at the bottom of the frame, nice and big and dark and foreground-y, holding up a single fragment of glass with the tower showing in it. One piece of glass to render, one piece of tower, a couple of nicely framed fingers making a familiar gesture and a landscape. That, you might be able to pull off convincingly.

[justa]

Stoat is correct, I wasn't even sure those were fingers for that matter until I read the comments. I'll also add: big orange sky=big orange light source. So blues and greens in the landscape (especially the river - they only look blue because they reflect the sky) are just not believeable.

D'Arcy

[niphree]

You are right J.R.Hollis and Stoat, with those fingers and glass. I try later this with hand at the bottom and see if it looks better.

@justa: I try to paint this from reference, but I did the sky more orange then it should be :/. I'm still not very good with colours. My reference:



thank you all for your help.