Just recently joined Polycount after a friend recommended this challenge to me. Here are my first thumbs/working progresses. Let me know what you think?
Hey Shaun Slade, good to see you're exploring your theme a little more. I think for establishing the mood and colors of the area your first ultra zoomed out shot works great, though if the idea is to give it to Epic to use I think it should be much more defined into what things are.
I suppose it's the kind of nature to this piece, I can't quite tell if the floating base is actually floating above mountains and the cool gray blobs are clouds, in that case it would be gigantic. or, if the base is not floating and instead it's attached to the side of the mountain side and the foreground rocks would be much smaller. So because of your lack of defining the shapes it's a mystery on what the actual scale is.
I do really enjoy how textural and colorful you made the ground but I'm a little confused on it as well. At first glance I couldn't tell there was water with reflections all the way across in splotches. I think that's just due to how you didn't really define the edge of the water and like everything else you left it pretty vague. Even a brighter rim of the edge of the water would help.
Similarly it seems... like you have some raging wildfire in the back closer to the base as what's evident by a hint of a big plume of smoke. But you also have nearly the exact same colors and values for what looks like to be a rock closer to the camera.
Lastly there's this rock, which get's confused for either being a rock or being a hole in the other rocks showing more of the blue gray. Just a bit too close to the blue-gray thing next to the base (again not sure if its a cloud or a bigger mountain)
You've got a very impressionistic look and that's cool, but as far a concept art contest I think a little more tightening up is in order so we can tell more clearly what your picture is.
1st of all I would love to say thank you FirebornForm for the in-depth and extremely helpful critique. Really helped me see flaws in my workflow. Haven't had much time to work on this but this is what I've got so far. Thanks once again FirebornForm
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I suppose it's the kind of nature to this piece, I can't quite tell if the floating base is actually floating above mountains and the cool gray blobs are clouds, in that case it would be gigantic. or, if the base is not floating and instead it's attached to the side of the mountain side and the foreground rocks would be much smaller. So because of your lack of defining the shapes it's a mystery on what the actual scale is.
I do really enjoy how textural and colorful you made the ground but I'm a little confused on it as well. At first glance I couldn't tell there was water with reflections all the way across in splotches. I think that's just due to how you didn't really define the edge of the water and like everything else you left it pretty vague. Even a brighter rim of the edge of the water would help.
Similarly it seems... like you have some raging wildfire in the back closer to the base as what's evident by a hint of a big plume of smoke. But you also have nearly the exact same colors and values for what looks like to be a rock closer to the camera.
Lastly there's this rock, which get's confused for either being a rock or being a hole in the other rocks showing more of the blue gray. Just a bit too close to the blue-gray thing next to the base (again not sure if its a cloud or a bigger mountain)
You've got a very impressionistic look and that's cool, but as far a concept art contest I think a little more tightening up is in order so we can tell more clearly what your picture is.