Thursday 15 October 2009

Hmmm



I think I need more practice. This digital painting melarky doesn't come naturally to a dyed-in-the-wool line artist like me. These are not very good hahahahaha!

3 comments:

Jim said...

Hey Check the undergrad Web CT for digital painting tutorials. If not catch Taylor on a Friday. He's definitely the man for that kind of malarkey.

Elcura said...

Digital painting does indeed take a while to get used to. I think the lack of convincing lighting is what is really hurting your pictures rather than your technique. You could paint with a solid brush with no opacity settings and still get a good picture with the correct lighting.

In the Room picture, I see a lot of artificial light, but the room is lacking those cold blue tones. If the large bright object in the top right is indeed a skylight (source of natural light), then the light from it needs to be a lot stronger and more obvious. The shadows on the bottom right probably wouldn't be that dark.

The shadows in the space picture are perhaps a bit too intense. You have a lot of complicated light sources here, so it's difficult to decide where the shadows should be and what indeed should be the main source of light (the Sun, then the light reflected from the Earth/Moon). Reference is really the best advice I could give. Watch some good space movies (graphically Sunshine is your best bet I think, but anything works).

It's difficult to say precisely what's "correct" and what isn't. But you made a great stab at some complex scenery. Environment work is all about lighting, it might help to work in greyscale so you can pin down the light and dark precisely before getting bogged down by colours.

I'm not sure what your main thing is (characters, levels, environments, etc) but more general advice would be to define your edges more. Lighter parts of the picture are generally sharper than dark, which is a lot softer. And I guess more time refining the image will get you a better result.

Anyway, nice art regardless of what I said. I hope I wasn't harsh or offensive, I usually ask people if they want a crit before I actually do it lol.

Elcura said...

Oh yeah, I forgot some other games you can reference for space lighting. Mass Effect, Deadspace, Fallout 3(Mothership Zeta), Halo 3, Halo ODST, other Bioware RPGs (Deus Ex, Knights of the old Republic etc).