Hey all.
I'm not a very good painter in almost every facet. My ability to picture and frame colors is lackluster, my ability to translate sketch to lineless color fields is pretty bad, etc.
I'm a fairly decent animator though, but that doesn't mean much when you don't have the budget to hire background painters.
So, I decided that I would sit down, and really learn the ins and outs of digital backgrounds.
Over the last couple days, although I didn't work on it yesterday, I came out with pic related.
It's not done, but I'm dipping down into the fluid layers of the wheat, so I'm just being cautious.
Anyone have any tips for background painting?
>>2567407
maybe lower the resolution of your painting?
>>2567409
Why's that?
>>2567407
I find it helps to think about painting as tone on tone.
If you really want to git gud in this area you need to study plein air painting and sketching. Shaddy has a landscape tutorial on youtube that's excellent and covers the basic digital landscape painting techniques used by most of the industry pros
is there actually a signature in the corner
>>2567488
So if you take a step back and look at the painting as a thumbnail it has some really nice coloring value use etc etc. which is a great start but when you actually take a look at the painting i can tell that you have already gone all out on the details in certain areas most likely using a really small brush to fill in the tiny stuff as soon as you were working on that section. thats not necessarily the wrong way of doing it but it sure is a hell of a lot harder to do it that way. id recommend doing what the other anon said and reduce the overall size/resolution of the picture and i mean by a lot. because you are looking into all the tiny things before the overall picture. this will slow you down and make random sections of the picture more detailed than others even if they aren't your focal point. when you work with such a large canvas at times you will find you can make incredibly small details on say the area where the wheat meets the mountain it looks really great up close but the mountain sides themselves cant reach that level of detail unless you decide to focus on every individual section of grass which you may not be capable of showing with the same attention to detail. you can also try to set a focal point and paint everything in that section in great detail and drift out into less detailed surroundings. but once again its up to you if you want to make the entire piece as detailed as possible it can be an amazing piece its just gonna take longer for you to do more iterations and if you are learning doing more faster is usually better.
>>2567549
It's like an onion, it has layers. The signature is just there on a separate one, for the portfolio print. It won't be there on the actual render version. The clouds are also going to be input later as tween'd layers in video editing.
>>2567763
Thank you, that's some good advice.
I'll be sure to spend more time detailing around the broken outhouse to draw attention.
However, when it comes to reducing the resolution, that I don't feel comfortable doing. If it were a normal digital painting I would absolutely do that, but this is a background for animation, which in the end will probably be finalized in 1440p. Due to render degradation and for the ideal of quality on LCD's, it's imperative that I have at the very least 1.2x the quality that I want the final product to have, although that doesn't quite matter so much on projection, due to light bleed blending pixels.
How would you suggest I detail the mountain side? I tried a bit of loosely packed color splotches a bit higher up on the far right, is that technique something I could apply to the rest of the face?
>>2567407
use your menstrual blood as paint, you'll make more money and get into gallerias regardless of any skill level
>>2569396
I'm SOL on that front.
my most ethnic heritage is greek, and I got a dick, so I'm basically fucked on the whole art school and gallery.
>>2567407
I like it OP, it reminds me of the backgrounds in the newer Rayman games.
Obviously it needs finishing and touching up, but seems to be going well so far.
>>2569735
<3
Thanks anon.
Were would you say it needs the most touching up?
>>2567407
Not the worst I've seen, maybe you should start in black and whites, get your values out better.
Also get some depth by using some atmospheric perspective in those foregrounds to express how vast the view is.
>>2569839
Alright, thanks anon!
>>2569824
The edge of the wheat, especially on the center left and the there's a weird smudge where the peak of the further away mountain meets the sky.
>>2570418
>>2569839
Okay, I've tried putting some atmospheric perspective in after the fact.
Since I'd done the far back mountain and put an overlay, it probably doesn't look very good, but I'll definitely keep it in mind for the early color portions of future projects.
I also added a few more clouds in true color without overlay to add to the effect, let me know if I overdid it
