Scratch

JudasR wrote:

i feel kinda odd about this because of what it lacks composition-wise. i mean sure, the tree is rendered pretty well, but besides that, there isn't much.

I said I did this in 20 minutes, mainly because I was excited at doing this for the first time and wanted to upload it. 

in terms of execution, i'd say you did most everything pretty well except the hill grass, it just looks messy and rushed. the clouds are a little iffy, not that bad, but you should use some reference for them next time.

The grass was messy and rushed, and I knew that and tried to make it much better in the second painting. The clouds, as I said, were very inconsiderate and arbitrary.

but enough about execution, let's look at what's in the picture. on the left you have one tree. one tree. something as simple as a bush or another tree going off the border would make the lone tree seem a little less out of place.

I thought of adding a second tree, plus some shrubbery to do some sprucing, but I decided against it because I was impatient, and I had this idea that emptiness and simplicity was a strength in that picture, but changed my mind to think it was a little plain upon posting it here.

on the right side you have a distant forest. All of the bottoms of the trees were cut off by the hill. the grass texture implies that the hill is at least somewhat flat, but the apparent dropoff that the trees are hiding behind completely contradicts this.

I did consider and even tried bringing the forest over the edge of the hill, but it didn't look quite right with the grass. The grass didn't get smaller in the distance like the trees, and I didn't know how to fix it right away, so I just settled for a forest that I thought looked like it was over the hill and far away.

resulting negative space is overwhelming and really detracts from the picture as a whole. something as simple as adding some more foreground objects or extending the distant forest over the hill would really spruce it up

I will have time today to make both pictures more complicated.

about the second picture:
i really like the improvement of the grass on the right side, and the fact that the trees look like they were all drawn instead of pasted. again, having the trees coming over the hill would help out the use of space in the image as well as helping depict the hill as a round, three dimensional surface.

I also considered creeping some bushes over the hill on the left side, but never tried... I will be sure to fix that today.

also, the dirt path shouldn't really have that much horizontal shading on it, or if you're using that to convey perspective, the gaps between the horizontal sections should get closer together the farther away the path is.

I can sympathize with that... I can normalize the path's shading, but I'm not sure that the distance between horizontal sections is much of a problem.

but what really got me was that the cabin is all the way at the right edge, and almost in the center vertically. you've probably heard of the rule of thirds, and it doesn't have to be obeyed incredibly strictly or anything, but the first thing most people will look at is the cabin, and when it's entirely on one side, the picture feels unbalanced.

I actually haven't heard of the rule of thirds (I painted my first picture yesterday  ), but I do know some about eye-catching and eye-motion across a work... I think I can fix the imbalance by adding some large trees on the left.

Thank you for such a constructive analysis!    I really appreciate your help. I'll remember what you've said next time.

V2

Last edited by illusionist (2013-03-03 12:15:14)

well that certainly changes things. about the mountain, the lighting looks like the sun is completely on the right as opposed to a little up and behind the mountains. but really, thumbs up, great job dude.

oh, and about the cabin one, i made a quick composition sketch when i wrote the other post but for some reason didn't post it

it might be a little hard to see what some things are since it's all red (a.k.a. i'm lazy) but hopefully it's easy enough to see

good job pretty picture

also hi

Amazing! I would have a go, but sadly I'm bogged down with schoolwork and my graphics tablet hates me :'(

great!

Well, these are good art.  I can't do anything in GIMP, so I'm pretty impressed.

I might put more things into the middleground.

nice    what brushes did you use?

illusionist wrote:

luiysia wrote:

nice    what brushes did you use?

I only use the default "acrylic" brushes that come with GIMP. I only modified one of them to make a custom grass brush.

http://i.imgur.com/YiMcizv.gif

I can haz new iPod screen!

Yay. I made a cloudy background using Gimp. I'm new to Gimp, so all I could do was make a gradient and smear white brushes.