CGTalk - WIP: Vivid Alien Sunset

CybrGfx

12-29-2007, 01:00 PM

I agree, the poles look better.

Beyond that, though, it's pretty "meh." You have a giant "dead zone" of fog between your overly dark foreground and your nicely detailed, but insignificant city.

What is your focal point of this piece? The title provides no clue, as the sunset doesn't look spectacularly alien, or spectacularly impressive as a sunset. The trees are contrived and inconsistent., with only one of such a great height, and the rest looking like dark globs on the bottom of your canvas with trunks on the bottom.

Your lighting is inconsistent and ineffective. If there is enough ambient light to show such delineation between all the backlit buildings in the distance, there should be enough ambient light to illuminate your foreground better.

The flow of this piece is pretty sad. You've effectively sliced it into 3 horizontal zones, the sky, the fog, and the dark lumpy trees, with a black shape weighing down the RH side, and the little alien dude on the disproportional tree trying to offset that weight, and the "floating" fog city and the horizon line SMACK in the middle of your canvas. That sin alone is a beginner's error that almost dooms this piece from the get go.

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice piece, you did a decent enough job of putting in a lot of time and effort into the detailing (Although 5 months is a bit excessive and obsessive). But you didn't have a good composition to begin with, and all the fancy detailing in the world will not fix that or camoflage it enough to make it work, even if you put another 5 months into it. It looks like at some point, all the fine detailing got boring, and so you started cutting corners with larger elements, like the fog blanket, and the dark and vague trees, with only the slightest of highlighting. The corners you cut with excessively dark shadows, fog, and clumping a bunch of trees on the bottom only point out more how the fine details of the city and the alien are inconsistent to the rest of the work. Even as a WIP, your lighting and current composition do not leave you much room for effective correction; as a piece only awaiting "final touches," there's not much beyond somewhat ubiquitous praise for your energy expenditure and patience that can be offered.

It's nice enough, but nothing really spectacular, without enough space on the canvas to really correct it very much. Too busy, with no clear focal point, stilted and choppy flow, and overly dark values. Personnally, I'd get rid of that contrived fog band in the middle, and fill in the distance with ground and city. I'd also ditch the mushroom forest of trees, and selectively place 5-8 throughout the canvas. Get rid of the black lump on the RH edge, and adjust the city skyline so the buildings aren't so uniform in height. The pole is almost the same level as the majority of buildings...
It needs a lot more than just "final touches," to my eye, as you can tell.

"Nudging" for comments is not usually "good form." If the work IS outstanding enough, you will not need to troll for comments. Especially on forums as large as these. You can see how many views your thread gets. If there are not a lot of comments, it often is because people's feelings often get hurt when they've put an inordinate amount of time into a piece that doesn't visually justify the investment, so many people just look, and move on. That, in itself, should tell you something, without having to request further input from other people, because then you have made such a specific request, that I may be tempted to tell you what I see. And even though I do not do this to hurt your feelings, or discourage you in any form, once I point out the visible discrepancies that I see, the fact that I can spot so many compositional and technical flaws may cause you some distress. "Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it," as they say.

This was a good, long (WAY too long) practice piece for you. Hopefully you've learned some good techniques, but you really need to work on general Composition and lighting. Oh, and SPEED. For 5 months of your Life, this should show much more overall development. If your time was taken up mainly on that city, your workflow needs some serious adjustment. Unless, of course, it's some sort of "therapy" for you, regardless how long it takes...Sorry I couldn't be more "gushing" about it.

Oh, the reason the pole version is preferred, is because it forces the eye past the horizontal bands by providing a stong vertical to give the eye some path back to the city and the sunset.

~Cyber