StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I've been meaning to get into this fancy "digital art" stuff for a while now, but I just yesterday got around to seriously trying it. My technique is far from what it could be; any comments or tips would be greatly appreciated. I made this picture of someone on a weird alien world, to try to capture the feeling of how huge the universe is:



This is mostly based on this picture from Dresden Codak, but I got rid of the weird humanoid thing and stuck the boating hat-guy in the middle of a forest of glowing white leafless trees.

I did the initial line art for the trees and the boat man using Inkscape (a vector drawing program) as well as filling in the major blocks of color, then went into the Gimp to add clouds, stars, the reflections on the water, a bunch of fancy layer-based glows and gaussian blurs, and miscellaneous fancy special effects.

My main gripes with my picture are these:

1. It looks flat; there's a layer with a boat man, and there's a background with trees against the sky, but that's it. I want it to look like the boat man is in the trees. How would I do that, though? 3D drawing is hard!

2. It looks kind of weird for the water to be so light colored, but it looked okay so I didn't go and mess with it. Is there some way to make this sort of thing less of a headache? Perhaps I should do more of the drawing in Inkscape to make it easier to change the line art and colors.

3. The water still looks fake. FAKE FAKE FAKE! Especially at the horizon. How the hell can you make water that looks good? I've seen it done, somehow, but I can't for the life of me figure out how.

I'm still quite proud of myself.

By the way, does anybody have recommendations for things to try next, for someone of my still meager skills?

I like it alot! it's really quite nice! keep it up!

Great stuff.

What you can do is have some of the trees emerge from the water around the boat as well. It currently looks as if the trees are based at the horizon or beyond it.

How you do that is have the ones looking smaller (further away) emerge on imaginary horizontal lines above the boat's base line is on.

Bigger trees (closer ones) would emerge from the water at imaginary horizontal lines below the boat's base line - preferable on the sides of the boat, where it doesn't obscure our POV of the boat.

Old Plympto wrote:What you can do is have some of the trees emerge from the water around the boat as well. It currently looks as if the trees are based at the horizon or beyond it.

How you do that is have the ones looking smaller (further away) emerge on imaginary horizontal lines above the boat's base line is on.

Bigger trees (closer ones) would emerge from the water at imaginary horizontal lines below the boat's base line - preferable on the sides of the boat, where it doesn't obscure our POV of the boat.

Awesome, thanks for the perspective hints. I drew a quick pencil sketch based on your post, and it's just what I'm looking for. It does make the reflections on the water a good deal more difficult, but I'm sure there's a way to do it.