[Frog]

Ummm, needs something to give it some interest or life. Any ideas?

The sea still needs some tidying up, but is mostly done. Any comments or crits on technique are welcome.

I'm just worried the image is boring but I'm not sure if I want to add a centre of interest such as a boat, so I thought why not ask?

I know that the lighthouse is quite small, ha ha.



(it goes quite well with the background colour of Sijun though).
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[AndyT]

The sea is great. Everything's convincing except the closer clouds. They look flat and too dark. Maybe a softer transition to the brighter clouds in the background could help?
The lighthouse is soooo cute
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[Capt. Fred]

err.. What light house??

: P okay, so I see now it but I was thinking 'what lighthouse?' for quite some time i tell ya. You may think it's fine that small -- since you know it's there. for someone not so aquainted with the image I say it's too small but you already said you know it's small so ill just shut-up mid-scentence and I'm gonna stop half way throu-

[aColdOldKodiak]

why not an old looking submarine? or something that wouldnt overtake the picture...
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[Epitaph]

or an old shipwreck?
image looks great by the way

[Al Ian]

wow..... Wow..... WOW......

I am completley blown away by this. The clowdes, the ski, the waves, the tiney detailes in everything, even the lighthouse many many miles away. All fantastic!!! Can we see a larger version (for desktops and what not?)
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[Frog]

Gosh - thanks for that last response, very nice I will post a larger version when it's finished, but I still need to decide where it's going. I might put a fishing trawler in, although the main problem is that the only real space left for it is bang in the middle of the composition...

Capt Fred & Andy T, comments gratefully received and noted, will make the lighthouse a *little* bigger and fix that cloud.
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[AndyT]

Maybe better don't fix the cloud...others seem to like it!
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[Al Ian]

Personaly, and this is my taste thing. I love how the image draws your eyes away from the center. It has the focal points along the sides. Which I think is very cool, and semi original!!!! After looking back, I would agree with a slightly taller light house, just enough to break the line of the mountian a bit more. Course, if you want to add something more, might as well toss my kids in the water with floaties on there arms!! (jk)
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[eyalyab]

dont alter anything. its very good. im actualy getting drawn to the wave in the center.

if i'd add anything, it would be a little fishing raw boat with two fisherman (coming back from a storm) with their clothes all ripped, as if they were out in the sea for a long time (they got swayed by a storm) and one is paddling the raws and the other is pointing at the lighthouse.
the boat should be in the bottom right corner.

its good that the lighthouse is small. almost unseen.

even if you dont add the boat. its still a great painting.
full version full version!!

[Ryknow]

Not a crit but you should take as a complament, Please show a tutorial or step by step for the water and its texture i am in this whole cthulhu phase right now and had an idea for him smashing the shit out of a boat but i cant do the water. Your water is very stunning
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[Frog]

Can't do a full tutorial so please accept this fairly detailed explanation:

I've been struggling with complex surfaces such as rocks and water myself for a year or so, this image is a bit of a breakthrough for me. I've been reading The Invisible Art - The Legends of Movie Matte Painting and although it's mostly a history of matte painting throughout movies it does contain a few tips, nothing new but seeing them alongside these amazing paintings made something click in me. The two most important tips for me were to use a big brush and not get bogged down in detail, and when painting something difficult to launch into it and feel it.

If this sounds a little abstract I'm sorry, I've heard similar advice again and again but it took a long time to sink in so I can understand if what I'm saying doesn't make a lot of sense!! My problem has always been that I am quite precise and literal, I'm pretty good with reference and can draw well, but when confronted with complexity as in rocks or water or any chaotic surface I'm paralysed because these things cannot be translated literally. My technique of observing and copying fails me in those situations.

This is where those two tips about using a big brush and feeling the subject come in. It's quite easy to rough out the big shapes with a big brush, try to get the main forms blocked in and get the tones and the light in - do not worry about the texture, it isn't important at this stage. Once that is done, keep using the big brush and slowly work some very rough texture into your image, observe from reference but be very loose and interpret and simplify what you see. Do not try to make an exact copy, but rather try to create a loose impression of the subject. Precision is not possible so try to create your own interpretation of it. Keep at this until you get something that feels right.

For this technique to work it's best to work big, my canvas size was 4000 pixels accross, and this is what my roughed in waves looked like at 50%:



Once I was satisfied with this rough texturing stage I then added detail and the finer texture, I did this by using custom brushes in PS7 that are designed to have some randomness and chaos to their strokes and edges - nothing fancy, just up some of the jitter settings. I used the underpainting as a guide and added more light and shade, and more chaos and randomness. Up close it's a mess of strokes but zoomed out it works. I had my document open in two views to see how it was coming along, one at 100% that I painted in and one zoomed out to 25% so that I could see the effect. I kept adding layers and layers of paint, and then using a big brush with a low opacity set to either "screen" or "multiply" to reinforce larger areas of light and shadow (such as the light coming through the tops of the waves etc). All the time I was doing this I was trying to convey a sense of what water like this looks like, but very very roughly.

Here is a detail of the finished water, so you can see exactly how rough and imprecise it is at 100%:


It does take some time to build up all that chaotic detail, but it's good fun to paint. One thing to try and look out for is to avoid any repetitive shapes and patterns, keep it chaotic and random otherwise the illusion doesn't work.

This, I think, is how most matte painters work. It's almost impressionistic and it's very expressive. Precision is unimportant, what counts is the illusion. For me the hardest thing about this approach is letting go of my urge to be precise and "correct", and as I said before it took me a while to understand this. If this explanation doesn't make sense, I'm really sorry, the only way I can talk through how I painted this is by explaining what went through my head at the time
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[Ryknow]

I'll have to try that frog thanks
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[sleepwalker]

Very good picture, and thanks for the tutorial man, appriciated!