Sand Caves
(view original)
Post a comment
Description
Had a lot of fun here. Tried out a new technique, which I really like. I'm not happy with the colors and light, still so much to learn for me.
Beautiful! The colours to me make it look natural and an old forest landscape that has decayed through time. I don't know what colour your aiming for but man, its better then whatever I can do :P
Q, let me put it like this: if this were on DeviantArt or any other website with a similar system, this image would go straight to My Favorites!
Fantastic work on this one, I love the lighting, the details, the theme, even the colors and pretty much everything else =)
I could not agree more Admiral - truly well stated.
Bloody hell, I freaking love the setting: Light entering a cavern, The reflection of the underground water and That stairway to the ruins creates a huge suspicion. + OVER 9000 to you my good sir
Its amazing! different to the usual dark-blue colours yet still contains the ambience of your unique style! plainly said - Awesomesauce!
really hope you can achive the near same feel of this picture with UDK, it should :)
This has nothing to do with UDK.
I think he means it would be cool to have this amazing color scheme and ambience in-game.
I agree, your concept art is so amazing with dramatic lighting & color...
I can't wait to see some in-game screenshots with the same feel
Yeah, would be cool. But, this is a personal piece of art, which is not related to Mindworld. So, it's never going to be realized in UDK.
Hey Q, where did you go to school?
Why do you ask?
So how many different photographs/paintings are used in this picture? I know you are working a lot with shapes and custom brushes (like the character), but I'm never sure about how much you actually paint. Where I see brushstrokes they seem to hide the underlying architecture and ground detail. The river looks painted, but it isn't painted the same style like some of the rest.
It's a great atmospheric painting and I'm quite baffled about the progress you made, remembering your tries to color and paint out stuff a year ago. This is a huge step ahead, but I wonder, if you base your concepts on existing paintings and work mainly on the composition. I wonder what's the ratio of painting versus copy/paste? Important is that it looks great and inspires. And it totally does that.
I worked around 1-2 hours on the composition and used around 5-10 paintings and photographies until I liked the result. At that stage, I already concentrated on neutralizing the atmosphere/light of the material, which required painting here and there.
After that, I started to refine the edges, added elements like the trees in the midground and foreground, added rocks here and there and so on. Some parts were painted over in that early stage so much already that the base was completely gone. I've also used some of my earlier paintings in there, but those are just very little elements.
Then, I added a base lightsetting and worked on the contrasts until the black and white painting felt done. A base color was introduced, which made some parts of the painting extremely dark, as the coloring technique was a bit different than usual, but I liked the result. In that phase I also started to paint some details here and there, refined the contrasts again, added a lot more light to it, added some more shapes, refined the edges again, worked with more textures for fine details and finally worked out the figure.
When that step was complete, I spent around another hour or so on refining the edges, working on level of depth, adjusting colors, adding more atmosphere and final details plus presentation.
Some elements can still be identified, if you look closely and know the original well enough, but it wasn't my goal to paint everything out completely, it was just for fun and I wanted to save some time.
Thanks for explaining the workflow. Important is that it works for what you want to achieve, and the picture does give a great impression. I've been wondering myself, if I should start using other images as basis. For example still images from movies I watch. That's no different than using photographs for matte painting, so why not do it?!
Thank you for the time to write such an essay. I've talked to the people whose works I've used in this piece and they all agreed that it's okay for them, if I use their work. That's mostly because you really have to know some pieces extremely well to recognize them in my work here. That's definitely not for all sources I've used, some can be identified.
However, I have to disagree with you on a point here. The materials I've used had various lightsettings that didn't fit together until I neutralized them to then set my own lightsetting to them. In order to do that, there's an understanding of light/atmosphere/mood necessary.
I know I'm getting a lot of admiration for this piece and I got a daily deviation on deviantart for it with hundreds to thousands of people loving this piece. But, you're forgetting an important aspect here. I'm not running around, showing this piece off to everyone to brag about my artistic skills. I'm not trying to become a professional concept artist or artist at all in my career any more, I've stopped practicing for that and I'm only doing it for fun now.
Also, please don't forget that I didn't just take random pieces and put them together for a randomly good composition. That would have taken like 5 minutes to do, but I used 1-2 hours until I've found several materials that work together nicely and give a good composition and feel. I never claimed to have painted this entirely by myself and I've also explained how I got to this result.
Amazing work master iQew!
<:D
fasinating
Very nice done!