A still of two undead, one comming back over a rope with two aparently not normal potions.
He is definatelly not sober. Neeed some details for the story.
Thats my first atempt to paint a still, so started with google sketchup to help with me start.
Let’s see how it goes.
Two things to watch out for at this stage:
The left figure is placed a bit too close to the top border of the image, pushing the visual weight of the image up without a good reason. Reconsider your composition and think about where the ideal locations for main focal areas are. Learn about the rule-of-thirds and golden ratio at the very least and build your compositions from there.
Don’t make the mistake of having everything too contrasty and visually noisy. Be selective where to have the strongest contrast, and where to be more vague to allow some breathing room in the composition. Also, make use of atmospheric perspective for a better sense of depth.
A couple other things to consider as well:
Be aware of tangents. Spatially it’s difficult to determine whether the drunk skeleton is balancing on the rope or the cliff. Since the background cliff lines up with the bottom of his feet and the rope, it becomes visually confusing. Either move the cliff down or up.
The bottom left hand corner is too busy with detail, it attracts the eye and I don’t think that is your desired goal. Detail should be reserved to the focal point or center of interest.
The sky shape is too contrasty and hard edged. Again, this is another area where the eye immediately focuses to. Consider enlarging the sky and graying the hue so it’s less prevalent.
If the skeleton is you focal point, particularly the drunk one, this is the area where you want to add details, harder edges, touches of stronger color, contrast, etc.
Just an image for now. I’ll put it like this, maby add sth later, but want to try how it will look since… the style will reflect the skill and it might get funny now.
Dude, this looks much better. It’s a lot less chaotic and more coherent, with better sense of depth, and better placement of main focal points.
Are you keeping everything all kind of brownish, or will there be more color variants?
Agreed! That’s a big improvement. Hopefully you keep on developing it.
A few more things to consider:
If brown is your prevalent color, perhaps introduce a variety of browns like Lunatique mentioned. Slightly cooler temperature or grayed down browns in the background and richer or warmer browns for the foreground skeleton.
I wouldn’t start the rope at the very corner of the frame. It has the effect of dividing the canvas in half. You may want to experiment with the placement. Such as moving it a little to the right or a little to the top.
Also, the canvas size seems to be of equal proportions. Rectangles are more attractive, which would be great for this canyon landscape.
The rope seems to be of equal width from start to finish. Perhaps reduce it in size as it stretches out towards the second skeleton.
These are just some thoughts. Anyhow, great update!
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