Yowza Jerry - I had your latest image on the screen & when I came back in the room it looked fantastic from a distance as well as close up. You’ve got the overall recession tones/scale-colours almost perfect – btw have you had any fine art/landscape-painting training? I’ll be amazed if you say no.

It depends what your final light source will be but I’d suggest the sketched-in shadows on the interior walls of the destroyed house need to be a little darker and the upper-storey interior wall a tad paler, its hue is more intense than the foreground house wall so tends to bring it forward when it’s supposed to be further away. The background houses/roofs/walls need to fall in line with those shadows because the sun appears to be high & behind them.

That’s an excellent illusion with the painted rubble and destroyed house, very clever - might it be possible to glue some 3D diminishing/faded rubble & broken rafters onto the pile inside the house to blend & complete the trick? Although maybe not because if/when you take photos from that end of the street it might all look strange.

Swear I just saw those guys breathing...



(The weird thing is I’m dawdling with a possible photo-article about scale-colour & a painted backdrop right now, spooky)

AYE! Just tried the ol’ go-out-the-room-and-look-at-it-from-a-distance ploy again & it looks superb, you’ve got a great 3D-effect going on in that destroyed house from up to 15ft away. The only thing that jars slightly is the left-hand roof – maybe fade it closer to the centre-right roof shade?

Amazed you’re self-taught – apart from having an inspirational art teacher for a year at school so am I. You reminded me of his opening speech quoting Picasso “The most terrifying thing in the world for me is a blank sheet of paper” and following it with his own motto “So be brave enough to paint it all wrong, it’s the only way to start learning how to paint it right”. As you say, trial & error - & I’d add take a magnifying glass to the experts’ work. He also banned black from the paints cupboard – “There’s no such colour apart from on Model T Fords, look at the spectrum! Mix blue & brown if you want Dark!” We never did get around to painting night scenes…

Hi Jerry - lots of good work and discussion going on here.

I like your readjustment of the backdrop - it looks like you slightly raised the right side - which in turn, slightly adjusted your vanishing point, making the painted building's back wall more in keeping with the perceived vanishing point of the built structure - whew!! A lot of words there! Haha - it looks spot on.

As to the conversation, less is more, keep it simple....for me those are more than simply valid points, and a lot easier said than done! Sort of like the apparent ease in making something look random - it's a lot easier to slip into some pattern or other...which you can't really see while doing it, but becomes immediately obvious when done. I think these challenges make this so interesting to try to do. Like knowing, or more honestly figuring out, when to add lots of detail and when not to - all part of the fun.

Ok - no more coffee for me! Nice work

Cheers
Nick

Great stuff again, Jerry.

This is going to be fantastic once it's done. As Tim said, one can almost sense them breathing...

Maybe put some paint on the edges/back of the foremost backdrop to hide the little white marks.

Really looking forward to the next post(s).

Cheers

Sean

No worries re PM. Thanks