/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>7147997
The best way would be to pull up one of their backgrounds and try to copy it. Right now your picture lacks depth, so it looks like I'm staring at a very close inclined hill. If that's the goal, great job. If not, you can add depth by fixing these things:

1. The color green at the top of your field and at the bottom are the same. As the field gets further away from us, it will get much lighter.
2. You have detail all throughout the field. We should see a lot of detail guiding our eyes in the front, a bit of detail in the middle, and depending on how far you wanna push the field out you can just use completely flat colors in the back. Seeing individual blades of grass on the horizon is bringing it way too close to us.
3. There's not a lot of contrast in the grass shadows. As grass gets closer to us it usually has some pretty deep shadows that appear. You do have a bit of those shadowed blades of grass, I'd push it further. These shadows give you interesting opportunities for appealing shapes.
4. You're building your field with round, puffy hills and blended shadows. These won't really be visible as they get further away. Broad patches of grass will get flatter, and tend to join in triangular shapes. Really pay attention to how small and thin most of the shapes get as they get further away.

You can see all of these things in this picture. Look up more Ghibli pictures to see these things in action, and look up real fields too. Even real fields will have all of these things.

>>6088108
You block in the large shapes, colors, and lights, figure out a smaller pattern that indicates the texture or item clusters, turn you brain off and paint away, it's very therapeutic.

One interesting thing I experienced with this is that you need to be relaxed and casual in order to produce an organic looking result, I've always been a sort of a cold robotic maths guy so all my nature detail painting attempts came off as stiff and unnatural, I had to take an analytical approach to other artists' patterns and consciously incorporate them into my work for some time before being able to relax and still produce organic looking results.

For example look at the Ghibli grass in pic related, you get that it's grass from a glance but don't actively notice it because it's laid out organically, whether my early attempts looked like bad texture work in a video game and stood out like a sore thumb because my habits were too robotic.