Well, sno4wy and I ran out of time because of massive amounts of schoolwork, so we’ll have to post this one as a finished project. Criticize if you want, but we won’t be able to incorporate the changes in time for the WC deadline. Martin suggested some expensive pens, so here they are. No real jewels, but those would go for a fair sum at Sotheby’s. 
sno4wy: Whee. Our first WC entry ever! Not surprising for me, though. What has meestaplu been up to? Waste of good talent! 
106 views and no replies? Wow, things on this forum are getting worse than I thought. %|
Agreed. It’s something I could never quite understand. I see it with stuff on the Traditional forum as well. Why do people do that?
I think it looks pretty nice. The gold parts of the pen could be shinier, they look a little like gold-colored plastic. But I think it’s a good image overall.
Yeah put in some reflections! Don’t forget something to reflect though…
@#(*% – it’s boring, as I feared. I’ll try to deal with those weird reflection problems, and try to get a better gold look. One of the two reference pens has duller gold, so that might have been part of the problem.
There was originally going to be a lot more stuff in the scene, but Sno4wy and I ran out of time – we’ll try to do more work on it this week, or maybe next weekend. This one’s too good to be abandoned.
Any suggestions on spicing up composition?
Matt
BLOOD! ADD LOTS OF BLOOD! BWA HA HA HA HA!!!
Not really boring, but not different enough from your last week thread to really need new comments. And you had quite good ones there.
gold is hard to make, but the first and more important is to get the spec and mirror color right. My way of doing it is to have the spec almost white while mirror truely yellow and playing with spec amount and mirror value. This will always depend of your lighting to get the best efect so experiment.
a smoothed large scale texture in nor and spec channel will help to make it less regular while keeping the specular higlights
you were asking about spicing up composition. your wood texture and your pens are both running in the same direction so everything is sliding away to the top right corner (or bottom left corner) one way to stop this is flip you wood texture so its a gentle X between the grain and the pens.
also to catch the eye from falling you could move the pen cap to the bottom corner where the pen tip is pointing to.
to stop them floating on the sea of grain you can anchor one small part of the pen to an edge.
It’s a mostly middle ground image. by generating a foreground middleground relationship or a middleground background relationship you can create more of a sense of space. If that interests you.
That’s interesting. I had noticed this when Matt was doing this, and he had mentioned something about the image being a study of parallel lines. I think he may have intentionally put the parallel effects in.
Now that’s interesting. We threw in the floor like that as a last resort, seeing as we were both procrastinating badly. I think we’ll try to put something else into the image in the future, but perhaps the pens theme is getting a bit tiring, and we may pick it up after another project. Excellent suggestion, though!
I particularly like the pen texture & the table how they together give off the right feeling
Cool! Maybe turn up the hardness on all the mats. Is each pen a mesh, or are they a group of meshes?
old thread.
How many old threads have you woken today, void? :< 
I count 39… Void, You going for for monkeydom or something??
but please, dont flood with posts…
sooorryyy.
promisse no more digging deep. me try.
someday though I do hope to be a monkey like you guys too 