Snowy Header – Mertens Creations

Here is a little bit of the process behind the creation of our new header image for Mertens Creations:

My original idea involved snow and a road stretching across the foreground, so I mocked up an idea and added a house and tree

Critiques:

the road looks like it is made of chocolate
the building looks like a generic farmhouse
the sky looks out of place

I adjusted the image a bit

Critiques:

The sky still looks wrong
The horse and rider look weird
The image looks incomplete

I scaled down the rider’s size to match the proportions of the house, I added mist, and I added snow to the roof of the farmhouse

Critiques:

The farmhouse doesn’t look right
The shadows in the foreground are too harsh

I lightened up the foreground, rotated the house, and added a windmill in hopes of “spicing up” the picture

At this point everybody agreed the picture was starting to look good, but I still wasn’t completely satisfied, so I tweaked the image some more

I added a fence in the foreground, I widened the base of the windmill, I added windows to the house, and I increased the amount of mist in the foreground. Also, I made the image more “blue.” While I didn’t like the contrasty shadows around the fence, I wasn’t sure how to fix them. I exported the result into Photoshop Elements, where I painted extra details onto the horse/rider and tweaked a few other things (including some of those contrasty shadows)

So that’s the final result (click the image to see a larger version). What do y’all think? Does the header still need tweaking? Is there anything that would make it better?

-Jack-

Hiker says:

January 12, 2012 at 2:39 pm

I really like how you added the windmill, mists, and rider to the header. I also like how you detailed the horse and rider in the end. The blue coloring for the picture improves the header a lot, too.

KiloT says:

January 12, 2012 at 5:52 pm

I like it! Of course, I have never done any kind of project like that, so I don’t really have any professional ability to critique your header, but all I would say is that adding/changing it any more might actually be too much. Sometimes just a “little bit more” can mess up a whole good project…
Making it sounds like it was a lot of tedious work that would have made me go crazy, but you did quite a nice job!

Mertens Creations says:

January 12, 2012 at 7:28 pm

Thanks! Yeah, 3d work can be pretty tedious, but as I’ve gotten better at 3d modelling/texturing/lighting, I’ve gotten used to the tedium involved :).

If I get a chance, I’m going to go back and tweak the header some more. A friend pointed out that there should be hoofprints in the snow where the horse walked…I always miss something!