Concept art - feeling a bit stuck

[RootBound]

Hey everyone,

I'm been coming back to this piece on and off for a few months, and I really like some aspects of it but not others.

Two questions:

1. I know I need to put SOMETHING on the left edge so that the landscape doesn't look like a flat pool table, but I also don't want the composition to feel too crowded there, so I don't really know what to do with it.

2. Stylistically, it feels inconsistent - The train and tracks and sky feel very clean (and I like them that way), but the water and marshlands look more impressionistic and brush-stroke-y. I'm not sure how to reconcile the two (or maybe just not sure how to draw marshlands using clean lines?).

Any advice would be appreciated.

[Gilbert]

1. Maybe put some animals on the left? Like cows or sheep. Place them at a distance so that they can be small blobs and not very detailed and not too crowded or distracting. Something like Loom^TM. (Alright, I did not mean to have green sheep, but you get the idea.) Putting some distance mountains/hills on the horizon may also help with the composition.

[Kastchey]

That's a sweet piece of art.

1. I also thought of distant fields and animals on them. Maybe a farmhouse, some haystacks. Very tiny in the distance, so that it doesn't clutter up your composition but enough to break the monotonous greenery.
2. The shrubbery is fine, I think. I'd focus on the water surface, it looks very stirred and contributes to the impressionistic-ish feeling the most. This said, it didn't occur to me before I read your question, so that's probably one of the things you start noticing when you stare at your own piece a little bit too long. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

[RootBound]

Hey, thanks for the suggestions both of you! I never thought of animals or a farm, so that's a great idea.

Making the water look less stirred is a useful way of looking at it too. I very much appreciate the feedback!

[Matti]

I really like the picture! My first thought though was your second issue: I think it IS rather inconsistent in style. I think the marshland has too many thin strokes and too many colors too, and it would look better if you made it smoother, using less colors and some bigger strokes.

Another thing that stands out for me is the clouds. They are so uniformally shaped and located, and the sky feels very unnatural and comic-like. I think it would benefit from making the clouds more randomly shaped and sized, and maybe less bright.

I really like the train, the rails, and the ground though  A farmhouse and animals are good ideas. A fence can also do wonders, or a forest in the background.

[ThreeOhFour]

Here's a few ideas that might help!

-Added some suggestion of distant undulations in the land
-Tried to flatten the heavy noise of the water a little so that the reeds & water don't blend together so much into noisy texture
-Used some of the closer clouds as a way to add interesting shapes to the composition!

Maybe these will help!

[Tomags]

The original picture is very nice. And I do like the "impresionist" parts of it.
In my opinion the fixes by ThreeOfFour are subtle but work very well and enhance them. Especially the shapes of the clouds.
Nice work

[Matti]

Nice improvements, Ben!

The clouds look much better in your picture, but I noticed there's still something weird: The clouds all end right before the edge of the screen. It would look better if some would go beyond.

[Snarky]

This looks great! I really like your treatment of the reeds, with the dash of purple, and also the gravel.

When it comes to the left-hand side, that's the sort of question for which I would consult photo reference. I think it's very important, because what you choose to put there will color how the whole landscape is perceived. If you put sheep or cattle or a barn or something, the whole thing will look like farmland (or at least grazing land). Personally I think the atmosphere is towards desolation (with that immense line of straight railroad disappearing in the distance), so I would try something that makes it look more like marshy moorland, e.g. tufts of heather or shrubs, or perhaps a small scree or patch of sand.

I think Ben (304) is right that you should break up the horizon a little, but IMO you should go a little more subtle, since the flatness of the landscape seems to be a point of the composition.

Personally, the bit that doesn't work for me is the sky. First, the clouds all line up against the edges, giving the impression that they are hemmed in by the 2D frame rather than existing in a 3D reality. (I see Matti also posted about this while I was writing.) The easy fix is to make some clouds be cut off by the edge.

Second, I feel that the sky and the ground don't entirely match. The dark coloring, soft shadows and lack of bright highlights on ground objects gives the impression of a somewhat dreary, overcast day, but you have a bright blue sky with only relatively distant clouds (which also don't seem to cast any shadows on the ground). I think if you replaced it with a gray sky, or at least toned it down to a hazier look, it would fit better. (I would also make particularly the more distant pond less blue, more gray, and note that at low angles, the notable thing about water surfaces is often their brightness against other terrain.)

[RootBound]

You folks are getting really detailed! It's great to get so much engagement with the picture and to get such a positive response mixed in with the suggested improvements. It's a lot to think about but it's all very helpful! 

I'll make sure to post the finished version here when it's complete. 

[Matti]

I played around with the reed, and while I'm not too happy with the result, I still wanted to share.

I think your reed looks better and more interesting, while in my edit it's less noisy and blends more into the marshland soil.

[RootBound]

Here's my revision.

Overall, I'm much happier with it. Thanks for all the feedback! It was helpful and I feel the piece has improved a lot.

-Added bigger foreground clouds, slightly adjust shapes of medium clouds, shifted layers so that some clouds extend past edge of image.
-Darkened all shadows and added cloud shadows on the ground
-Brightened the water and lengthened the brushstrokes on the water surface
-Added smaller reeds at water's edge
-Added farm fence on the left
-Slight contouring to horizon

[AndreasBlack]

You need to think of the distant sky as more blurred and not as eyepopping, i think. The sky colors are way over saturated to my eyes. It might sound dumb, but google "daylight sky" and perhaps download a picture and grab some colors with the photoshop eyedropper tool! "Real Artists" look at real life all the time. Mark Ferrari said this in his GDQ talk, he's a real artist i'm not! . It's the best way there is to get the colors right! Also it's unclear to me is it supposed to be pixelart or not? Cause the resolution seems kinda high for pixelart

Also your clouds now look like they have a form where the gray is it's bottom shape, which might be your artistic choice, after all art is art. I would have liked grays sky light blue in the clouds too! When objects are distant it usually gets less saturated colors. Just my own observation. So your green fields should really be more brighter and less saturated the furter away from the camera they get. Look out of your own window and see if you can spot distant objects. Forexample i see tree's far away from my window now, they are clearly less saturated then the ones just 100meters away from my window which have more eyepoppin' colors Great to see all guys helping out in the thread tho! I can give this a shoot later but i need to know if i'm allowed to use the brush tool or not 

[RootBound]

Hey @AndreasBlack thanks for the ideas.    I chose more saturation deliberately because I wanted it to be more pleasant to look at. Total realism isn't the goal, just enough realism to feel not cartoonish. A sort of cleaner, touched-up reality if you will. 

At this point I think I have moved on from the piece to work on other things, so no brush tool needed. But thanks for the offer. I prefer "awesome" over "good enough" but I also prefer "finished" over "100% perfect."