Micro's wips

Looking good micro! That teal character piece reminds me of Dead Space for some reason.

Thanks Crankshaft I'm still going with the sketches, but I swear i'm going to start detailing these soon!!

I really feel like painting flowers and plants right now, if winter was a person I would bash his brains in.
Added some color !!!

Looking good micro! I'm seeing a checkered board behind the translucent areas of your paintings, they look like the transparency in photoshop. Not sure how you're saving them (some file formats don't allow transparency) but you can try a solid fill as a base to avoid that look. Regarding the mountain pic I'd lighten up the bottom portion a bit to balance the upper half.

I can't see the checks that Crank has spotted, but I agree with the advice about lightening the foreground. General rule of thumb in landscapes is the further away the lower the contrast. Lightening up the foreground will make the details on the hillside stand out.

I can see the checkerboard pattern. It shows in the tree trunk area of the previous picture (the one before the last one.) But transparency doesn't show in jpegs (it usually fills it with flat background colour when I do it) so I suspect that it's an upscaled lores texture overlay (but may be wrong!)

I'm liking the progress though. The dappled yet glaring light effects work really well.

D'you know, I'm so dense!! I didn't even look at the other paintings, only that last one! So I was like, what checks!?

I agree with Val (now that I've looked!). Some lovely progress here! If it's one thing I cannot do, it's landscapes!! I therefore doth my cap to thee, young Mic!

Thanks guys, don't worry Dom lol. It's funny that you noticed that Crank. It's just that checkered pattern that's the default for photoshop if you delete that locked white layer that's the default when you create a new document. I guess I should just keep it there in the future, just painted over it and some of the checkered background still shows through. I wish it was as sophisticated as your theory Valence i'm going to try to finish up all of these pics next month

Well that's odd! When saving wips for posting here do you use "Save As..." or do you take a screen grab? The latter would preserve the pattern but the former shouldn't (not to my nerdy yet limited knowledge.) The checkerboard pattern is a function of the way that the particular software (Photoshop or otherwise) "displays" the transparency it's not an intrinsic part of any file format (even if that format supports transparency, link PNG) and shouldn't be saved as visible pixels in a non-transparency-supported jpeg.
I remember once when I was trying to create some 2d sprites for a game, I really wanted to keep the checkerboard pattern in the jpeg, just to make it look good knowing it wouldn't really be transparent any more, and I just couldn't do it without resorting to the screen grab method. Clearly I was doing something wrong, or software has changed over the years.
I like this techno-nerdy stuff and I think I'm now going to waste lots of my time playing about with this tomorrow instead of painting the picture I should be.