Midnight Oil (surrealist WIP)

#1

Hello all, this is my first post on CGtalk in maybe 7 years, its so strange to be back! I took a long break from cg, but the computer has called me back again. This is the first piece I’ve tried to work on to conclusion using a Wacom tablet and photoshop.

I would love some critique at this point. For a while I was calling this finished, but its missing something, a last pass over to make it POP, but Im not quite sure what that would be. I’m not going for exact realism with the forms and shapes, but would like things to feel dreamlike and vibrating.

Please let me know what you think!

thank you,
-Ari

#2

If you want this surreal image to appear dreamlike and vibrating (I think you meant “shimmering”?), then you need to convey that with the lighting, the colors, the way you control the depth of field and opacity of each element, and so on. Right now, everything is too solid and flat, as fi they all share the same space in Z-depth. There’s also no lighting to speak of, which gives this image a cartoony, flat look, which doesn’t really help in making it seem dreamy and shimmering.

I would suggest you think about the overall atmosphere you want to portray–is it a darkly lit scene? What are the light sources? Do the different elements in the image overlap and have different opacity levels (as if they are ghostly illusions)? Are there color choices you can make to give this scene an ethereal, dreamy look?

#3

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