.:please rip apart:.

[photeck121]

The clouds or nebula was done on Painter 9. As you can tell i use the soft blender alot. the station and crappy ship were quickly roughed in on photoshop. I used the custom filter alot on this piece as well just to sharpen it all up.
Inspired by homeworld 2:teeth:

Just need some critique on it, especially the background.

http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/9200/waterattack1ly.jpg (http://imageshack.us)
Thanks :yayca:

[inspector Lee]

Uh, I think you forgot to post your image. No I take that back, it's just taking forever to load. You may want to resize it a bit smaller.
I really like the colors and painterly looseness in the sky, very nice. I'm not feeling the stars though (if that is what all those little specks of light are). Their size and brightness is too uniform and they're showing through even the thickest clouds. I'd have to say the weakest part of this, is the composition. you have two objects (one on each side of the composition) that are relatively close in size and contrast, just floating. Nothing to push the ship closer to the viewer, no interesting cropping, and no dynamic angles. Very boring. I know the sky is really the "hero" of this piece, but that doesn't mean the rest of the elements can't still be composed in a dynamic and interesting way. And the station looks like a total afterthought. Not well designed or conceived and pretty mushy in construction. Also, having it almost touch the top edge of the composition, is creating a weird tension. Definitely could use some atmosphere between the viewer and the station (and even more atmosphere between viewer and farther station). I know I ripped this apart, but I just want to repeat I really like the color in the sky. Very dramatic and great palette.

[Lewis]

maybe add some life (birds)
and what are those yellow dots all over the screen? Maybe decrease the amount of those.

Very very nice pic btw

[Kian]

I really like the mood of this alot! I can see it finished, and I mean it when I say, this is a good start! You should spend hours toiling over this. It will pay off in the end man. Take above crits into consideration.
My advice would be to find a good photoshop starfield tutorial (theres loads out there) and really sort your stars out. They're obvious "dots" right now, all at the same level of intensity.
Then, spend hours on end on these clouds. Use loads of cloud references.
But as Inspector Lee said; do a high class design of the ship first, above all else.

If you do all this, you'll have a champion piece.

p.s. I f**king LOVE Ron Burgundy

[noche]

nice susnet. maybe a crop, of prat of the left side.

[photeck121]

inspector lee-cheers for the crit, i think you've really highlighted my mistakes and i totally agree with you on the composition. Its meant to be in a nebula (thats what all the stars/specks were meant to be) i just used a the variable airbrush on painter for them. I suppose the ship and the station were kind of an afterthought. lol i think i spent a total time of twenty or so minutes on them. It was just meant to be a quick 1 hour speedpaint but i got a little carried away with the clouds.
Kian3001- Ron Burgundy does f**cking rule!! i have a friend who dresses just like him even though he hasn't actually seen ancherman. Thanks for the crit, i spent about two hours on it but i could have spent alot longer on it. Maybe i'll go back and touch it up:teeth:

[masque]

your nebula looks way too much like a terrestrial cloudbank at sunset. look up some refs of emission nebulae on the web, note the colors depicted -- they are rarely oranges and yellows, because they are not reflected light but emitted light, from glowing atoms in the extremely thin gas clouds that make up the nebulae. to the naked eye, most emission nebulae, like that in Orion, look pale greyish green -- the other colors are recorded by deep time exposures, something the eye cannot do, or by computer enhancement and false color assignment.

also note the nebulae's structures, which are not at all like the water-vapor clouds of earth. most emission nebulae are the "lit-up" portion of a vast molecular cloud surrounding a young star cluster, so they are formed and illuminated by physics totally different than earthly clouds, and the painting should portray that if you want it to be reasonably accurate and recognizable as intended.

[photeck121]

masque-cheers for the crit, yeah as you can see i didn't use any nebula ref. I'll try to take into consideration what you've pointed out next time i do a painting like this.