Artisitc Merits

I know jack shit about painting but I admire the willingness to take the first step into something new like that, especially in a public setting. And insofar as I have any perception of such things, it definitely looks like an encouraging result of your first project.

I think it has most to do with a young enthusiastic artist. People are beguiled into turning up to support her because she clearly was excited and fearless about talking to strangers about her little plot. Never would have done it otherwise. An older person would have been more circumspect in their approach, realizing that most people would rather not step out of their comfort zone; but she sort of grabbed anyone who walked into the bar in the weeks before. There's a certain irresistible power to social naivety when coupled to enthusiasm.

in the video he has his vanishing point above center as well- Halfy

{{{Yeah - middlish is a good point in terms of distance but in general most artists try to avoid putting there unless there is a specific reason as a 50/50 split of the canvas is not always good. So its more commonly a bit below or a bit above- but it represents the eye line of the viewer so it rather depends where you want them to look- in the case of the painting you were inspired by its low, which is what allows all the room at the top for the leaves that you found yourself short of. It also upsets your foreground as the lines no longer converge on the corners of the painting but go out the picture higher up- this gives you a really wide area of road to fill in taking up almost the entire bottom half of the image and it pushes your foreground trees out of the image altogether- which means you cant get them close enough together in your foreground to form the leafy canopy of the original.

But again let me say I really like what you did, especially as a first go and in the circumstances you did it- and I am a big fan of the colour selection. Hoping you take these tips as just that- some handy tips Ive picked up over the years to share, I'm not knocking your picture- I like it.}}

I think I still like Halfy’s painting better, though I can see what you’re saying Petty. A certain naive quality about it. Like Van Gogh... sort of...

{{Some bugger is nicking my art work!!!

Heres a landscape I recently made and put on my facebook-



And here's a picture a friend just alerted me too-




They've brightened it slightly, upped the saturation of the yellows and bunged a 'flare' effect in the top left- but its unmistakably my original! I am kind of flattered someone thought anything of mine worth nicking- but still would have been nice to have been asked!   }}

Low act... and lazy...

{{I'll say its lazy- that picture isn't even of Scotland- its not anywhere, it exists only in my imagination! And the sun can't possibly be where they have put that flare, the lighting is wrong for it }}}}

I'm rather confused by the lighting - is the peak in back lighter because of snow cover?  Can't be that it's lit up while the others aren't: they are too dark be due to cloud cover.

I see they are some kind of studio, could likely be subject to embarrassment if you felt like going after them.

{{In my original the sun is 3/4 up the height of the image and off the left side of the image out of view (you can get an idea where it is if you look closely at the mountain in the original and follow the direction of the light beams)- took me about an hour of fiddling about to get it so the light would fall only on the distant mountain and not the foreground. A mixture of moving the sun position about and altering the thickness and make up of the cloud cover to allow enough light through at the right point.

As for gong after them- well as far as I can tell they are in Indonesia or somewhere similar- given huge media entities cant get copyright protection in such parts doubt Ill have much luck! }}}

I saw that pic on facebook & I immediately thought of LOTR's when I saw it. In one sense you could see it as a compliment that someone liked your pic enough to pinch it but, me ? Id be fecking annoyed. I would have been nicer to bloodywell ASK ?

If not ask, at least attribute.

I'm rather confused by the lighting - is the peak in back lighter because of snow cover?  Can't be that it's lit up while the others aren't: they are too dark be due to cloud cover.- Halfy

{{Here's the tab for my sun settings-



as you can see its not high up the sky relatively, at only 14 degrees or so above the horizon, this lets the light get  a bit 'under' the clouds in the distance.
But because of the thickness of the clouds everything was basically still dark with just some light flecking the clouds- the default sun strength is 1 so I next cranked that up to 5 so that much more light would get through.
I left soft shadows off because that would have weakened the edges of the sunbeams in the distance and I wanted them to remain quite defined.

Next was the cloud layer itself-



First thing I did with the clouds was to hit the seed button a few times and let it randomly generate a seed to base the clouds on (within the cloud parameters I had set for it) until I got them more or less where I felt they needed to be.
Its quite low lying as I wanted it to hug the land and just leave a strip of light between and its quite deep (thicker you make it longer it takes to render and higher you need the cloud detail settings to render cleanly which in turn slows render times down even more!   )
Next step was to take the cloud density down from 1 to 0.4 until enough ambient light was filtering through the cloud cover to strike the mountain in the distance and finally I took the cloud coverage down to -0.05 which created enough gaps in the cloud cover for shafts of sun to get through.
I could also have adjusted the falloff setting- this is how much the cloud disperses from the centre outwards to its edge but as I had got what I wanted by that point it was simply not necessary- but its another option in altering the clouds where needed.
And that- which was about an hour of making tiny tweaks, test renders, more tiny tweeks- is my dear Halfy, in a nutshell, how I got the light to only hit the distant mountain not the foreground! }}}

see it as a compliment that someone liked your pic enough to pinch it but, me ? Id be fecking annoyed- Azriel


{{I'm kind of both- flattered and crabbit about it! That's a hard emotion for a Scotshobbit to pull off!! - see I dont know where to put my face!!

Halfy- yup Id have accepted it being attributed to me- maybe it is for all I know- cant seem to find this art studio online anywhere!}}}}}}

You may want to start affixing signatures to your work.

But I see, you had the sun cutting at such a steep angle through the clouds that they were effectively close to infinite thickness, so when there was a gap the contrast was striking.

{{Well, that's the short way to put it, yes!! }}

So the last time I posted this picture it was taken in a darkened room.  Here's a picture taken in sunshine...in fact I had never seen it in sunshine before this was posted (the young artist who led the painting event still has them and has now mounted them.  Gotta figure out where.)



quite a bit brighter than the previous (last page). I like the trees better in this lit version, but I think I prefer the sky and ground in the darker version. This is a bit lurid.

{{Amazing what a difference lighting makes! I like this more actually- its less 'muddy' than the first one for want of a better word, the trees work better here as the greens pop more }}

Yeah, much less muddy.  But the ground should be somewhat muddy which is why I preferred the dark version for that.  The sky I can go either way on, but the trees are definitely more satisfying in this light.  I like the yellow undertones of the forest, which I've never actually seen before, even when I painted it! I thought it was light green at the time.

And those things that look like crows around the treetops?  Let's just go ahead and say they are crows.  Much better than what I was trying to do.  We'll just keep mum on that.

{{ I was going with crows already Halfy- your secret is safe }}}

I really like it, its so alive

I showed it to a friend and she dismissed with one glance saying the dogs are too big.

When compared to the trees I suppose they may be as big as large bears.

pish & posh ! Art is how you see it If it makes you happy then the goal has been achieved

azriel wrote:pish & posh ! Art is how you see it  If it makes you happy then the goal has been achieved

Exactly. Call it art. Call it naive art. I do not need to call it anything, I just like it.

Very insightful comments, Petty. I appreciate the economy of language.