Landscapes/Environments? (Request)

[J Wilson]

Lately I've had an art director that has been requesting more and more landscape and envionment work. Apparently he has liked the ones I have already done for him, which is why I'm getting more of them. The problem is, I've never really focused on them in the past, preferring creatures and characters, so I feel weak in this area. This has been a good learning experience, but I'd really like to find a good source of landscape and environment "rules". There are so many different weather and lighting conditions possible that I feel a little like I'm reinventing the wheel each time to figure out what works in each situation. I do resreach for each situation, but I still end up playing with things until they "feel" right. For example, sunset plays by different rules than mid day, in that mid day things closer to the horizon tend to get lighter and take on the color of the sky, but at sunset they tend to get darker until they are dark silhouettes. Then rain, snow, dust, fog, etc come into play. I admit I get confused on where things should sometimes go in a value hierarchy. Ah, why didn't I take the time to learn this stuff more thoroughly sooner? :P

[Anid Maro]

Here's a pretty nifty tutorial I'd found forever ago about light (http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm), in particular I think you'd find the section on natural lighting (http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/tutorials/light03.htm) helpful.

Off the top of my head I recall the old academic formula for painting a landscape. You'd have a darkened foreground, followed by a lightened middle area (the focus of the painting), and then the background would be darkened again. Like I said, it's formulaic and specific to acadamy style painting prior to the impressionist movement (so the subject is usually some ancient Greek ruins or some such), but it could be a starting point for something a little less formulaic. Like maybe switch the values around to Light-Dark-Light, or take out one of the tiers for just Light-Dark or Dark-Light, or add one more tier, or work horizontally instead of vertically, et cetera.

Beyond that all I have to say is reference what you can. I also consider environments a weak point, I've read about them and looked at a bunch of landscapes but haven't had much practice in the actual doing. So I couldn't imagine attempting without reference because I know eventually I'll get hung up when I realize I don't know how to paint a convincing rock or something mundane like that. :)

[J Wilson]

Anid Maro, thanks! That's pretty much exactly what I was hoping to find! I read the portion on natural light first, and it does answer a few of my questions, so it's already helped. I'm going to check out the other pages and reread that portion more thoroughly later.

If anyone is aware of similar instructions, with the knowledge applied to art in examples, those would rock too. I'm curious what the dedicated environment concept artists used to learn from. In anatomy everyone knows Bridgman and Loomis, is there a similar "bible" for landscapes?

[azekariel]

Weeell, I'm not sure about a landscape bible, though if there is such a thing, I will definetely have to buy a copy.
I do know of this site- http://idrawgirls.blogspot.com/search/label/Tutorial%3A%20Enviroment%20and%20Landscapes
If you skim down the menu on the right, there are a bunch more landscape tuts. I learnt quite a lot simply by watching how this guy paints. Hopefully more people will post stuff, as this is an area of art I'm interested in exploring.