Realistic Lighting 101: the sun is your light source, therefore I would put even more shadow on the side of the craft that is facing away from the sun. And some on the desert sands. Same goes for the man, more shadow on his back and right, and he is also leaving some shadows on the rocks he is standing on. I see that you are using highlights and shading, and those look good. If your intuition doesn't get you what you had in mind you can use guidelines to do shadowing.
Advanced Realistic Lighting: Light is reflected from the sand on the spacecraft. This will make the shadows on the spacecraft a bit more yellowish, and the shadows on the sands more greenish. The same goes for the guy standing on the rocks. In Photoshop I use the HSB Slider to pick a color that is somewhere inbetween.
environment/scenery: a rule you can apply is that colors get more blurred with distance. I guts tell me to let the sands fade with the sky at the horizon, because of the heat. If that wouldn't be satisfied with that I'd check some desert pictures (and use the sampler to get the same colors) I was halfway doing the landscape for my sketch for this topic that I found out I had to add some depth. In the front there are more rocks with more distance between them and in the back there are fewer rocks with less distance beteen them.
Composition is allright, the way it is it feels like the man and the rocks and the sand and the spacecraft are very separate from eachother. It makes the viewer look at those things as what they are by themselves, rather then giving a sense that they tell one story and belong together. This is a great techinque when you want to get through a feeling of separation or alienation or paranoia or something surreal.
..everything is blindingly lit, especially with the near noon sun, as shown in the image.
so making the image a bit brighter would look nice, but I have no real contribution, =D
Cyclops has beaten me to it. =P
Umm, I haven't been in a real sand desert, but when I was in Greenland I went a little inland with a snowmobile, that was a whole white world, white snow and blue sky. Also I lived in the north of Iceland for a short while where it's just rocks and snow when you go inland.
So, Helix, would you recommend high contrast shading for a desert sketch?
Hmmm, I think it would look nice, but selectively, otherwise it would just look washed out and too much like a nuclear bomb just exploded. =)
I think colour choice, especially for a desert scene, is hard, becuase the sand comes in so many shades of purple, brown, black and off-white,
but it's exactly that choice of colour and contrast that makes desert and snow/ice scenes pop.
The first image is in my country, the other, in America somewhere.
although geography plays no major role when it comes to deserts,
I have come to notice in America, the 'desert' has way less colour and
here in Namibia, it's very colourful, like I said, purple sand is the best! =)
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