I found some inspiration last night
I really got in the mood for painting last night, and I got farther than I would have expected on the painting that I am working on. Not only that, but I am also very pleased with the direction it is taking.
I got the cliffs looking more massive by adding objects for scale. it’s really incredible how much something as simple as a couple of birds will change the scale of the objects in a painting.
As you can see I am adding in a cliff-side village and it is really important for scale of the landscape. At first I had the buildings much bigger than they are now, but the grandeur of the cliffs just wasn’t what I wanted it to be. One would think I could just shrink the village down as small as I want but I found that there is a threshold when resizing it as too small will make the believability of the image lose credibility. My colors may also be still to light, but I am running into difficulties with that with this diffused lighting. One thing that I have found in my painting is that I never seem to be aggressive enough when pushing values to their extremes (darker darks, and lighter lights). It is this contrast that will really draw the eye into the image and make the composition that much more believable. I am happy with the direction this is going and I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it for a while. My roommates and in house critics David Wardell and D. Schuyler Burks were able to give me new insight to the composition. They saw the landscape and threw some ideas my way, my favorite being a pirate ship.
So in the next update I will hopefully have that pirate ship ready to go and show you.
At this point I’m not really sure what the final image will look like, meaning, will I stay in this stylized form or will I push the image into photo-realism? I really like how the stylized image is looking, and it will already be a good piece for my concept art portfolio, but I have very little photo-real work in my portfolio. I suppose only time will tell.
Until then, I leave you with something that has been making me laugh non-stop for three days, here.
