TBH, I sorta fell out of love with my idea for the "Horizon" prompt today. I was getting kinda bored of drawing Stormy's back facing a barren landscape (between the thumbnails and the sketches I've already done)

So instead I wanted to do a simple background/landscape study

Here's the original I was trying to reference for my study: https://www.patreon.com/posts/mount.....-hike-78201734
(Twitter/X link: https://x.com/TwoKinds/status/1622286789028319234 )

I was pretty happy with the foreground + boulders, I struggled a bit with the shape of the ridge in the midground, and the background mountain took a couple attempts to get the shape quite right

The valley in the left got a little cluttered. It was getting difficult for me to tell the difference between grass and river that far away in the background (the atmospheric perspective made the edges blend more than I was able to distinguish from, so I had to wing-it". As a result, the rolling hills that fade iinto the horizon ended up being cluttered

I'm not happy with the clouds. They're very hard, and no matter how many times I tried to visually copy the shape from the reference, it never fit quite right. So I ended up just rushing to slap whatever in as my hour for today ran out. I tried to "balance out the composition" by adding clouds to the other side, but I ended up adding too many and not getting to use any negative space, so the whole piece on the "upper left diagonal" feels unbalanced and cluttered, betwee,n the valley and the clouds. If I were to take this to phase 2, I would simplify and make the clouds smaller

Admittedly, I also put zero effort into the foliage (bushes+trees), just leaving them as hatched circles/triangles. If I had more time, I'd spend extra time trying to make it more irregular & organic, but the focus here was on the initial construction of the landscape more than the detailing

I did learn a few interesting things since a lot of the composition elements didn't follow some of the rules I'd learned previously (literally nothing in the reference quite lines up with the "rule of thirds". I do appreciate the sorta "diagonal across" composition, but I totally broke it with the clouds

Learning experience. A long way to go before I can make backgrounds I'll be happy with, but hey, it's something new to add to my toolbelt. Main takeaways are that (1) clouds are hard and can ruin a composition if you overdo them, and it's easy to overdo them (2) don't add too much detail to the background. Even with atmospheric perspective, if can quickly get cluttered. I should've done less zooming-in. I wanted to make sure things in the river lined up appropriately, but I just ended up detailing too hard

Tomorrow will be a more challenging piece. Prompt is "roam" and I want to try doing another fullbody of Stormy for with at least part of a background (a fantasy village market). Based on how things are going, a fullbody by itself will take the full hour. So I may end up giving her outfit less detail in order to get all the shapes in place. I don't have any thumbnails to reference for it either, so I bet it'll take longer. Will try