This was a difficult project to figure out. I started it in January. I wanted to do a a landscape and took a bunch of reference photos on Cape Cod last December hoping got get something I could paint as a practice. I settled on an image of the dune with the clouds prominently featured and the shoreline far below in the distance. I painted and repainted the clouds until I did not hate them. The dune itself was lots of grass and sand - LOTS of grass.... I was really hating it until I had painted enough of the grass to show what it would look like finally filled in.
As it went along I realized there was zero, sense of scale. Was the dune several feet or many stories high? It was, in fact, many stories high and the shoreline in the corner did not emphasize that in in any way. I also decided to let myself get sloppy with the details as I got towards the bottom of the painting so the point of interest was more towards the top of the dune. That was also not satisfying and I looked through more references and saw some had people walking up the side of the dune. I decided to add a figure on top or maybe on the right side. It was December and everyone there was in winter coats but since you also could not tell what season it was I posed a 3D character from a short film that took place on a beach, lit him and used that image to paint from, ultimately putting him on the upper left top - which seemed dramatic enough. The scale isn't far off, in reality he would be a little smaller but I did not like how that looked.
So I think it looks Ok but it's still basically a failed landscape painting in some ways.
2 comments:
I don't think it fails at all. I totally agree with the addition of the figure and really like how this came out. Getting a little messy works fine. There's a great sense of scale here. It reminds me a little of "Christina's World," if you know that Andrew Wyeth painting. Sometimes you have to work over time and in pieces. That's the best part of digital art making! Very well done, I think. Pat yourself on the back!
Thanks Mr Wig! It does have sort of P-town version of Christina's world about it. Without that figure the scale was completely lost, I thought I could get it with the dune and the distant shore alone but that really did not work. It is something really outside what I might normally try so that was good, I thought!
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