Hi, nomuse, thanks for the kind comments!

This scene was my attempt to focus on lighting and scene composition.

I think in many ways, lighting and composition is more important than modeling. Without the right colors, illumination and composition, a viewer isn't going to spend the time on the picture necessary to notice the nice modeling. And with the right color and comp, you might not care about the poor modeling. In the painting world, you wouldn't consider the expressionist good 'modelers', it was the other stuff they made work. Of course, many viewers past and present knock them for that so one rule is you will never satisfy all viewers.

In my case, I'm a rank neophyte in these matters but I have been reading up on color and composition. The reason I have been reading up on such things is frustration with my pictures not really captiving viewers (either in the galleries or with friends.) They were neat scenes with interesting modeling in some cases. Why didn't people spend the time on them to notice the neat stuff?

I think it was lack of attention to color and composition. With the right color and composition, the artist guides your eye to the interesting stuff and the whole thing is 'easy' on the eye. With the wrong choices, the eye gets lost, the brain doesn't take in the picture and the viewer moves onto the next image in the gallery without posting a comment. It's as simple as that.

I can't claim to have mastered color and composition, only to begin to appreciate the need for it. Only today, while reading a new book on the subject I was chagrined to realize that the pigment (paint) and monitor (video display) primary colors and color complements are not the same. Note the orange/blue lighting on the assassin. It should probably be red/blue (although that orange looks pretty reddish anyway ;-).

The scene composition was inspired by a picture I saw in Newsweek from a famous photographer. In that picture there were two roads, not the canal and road. I think the picture worked because the edge of the higher road formed a path that drew the eye into the picture. That was originally the heart of my picture however, with a comment from a friend, I realized that the path thing doesn't work well with a significant object on the side because with the side object (the assassin) the path tends to lead to the center of the image which makes for an unbalanced picture. So I cropped the path out. I don't think it is necessary to guide the eye in this case because the door and the yellow light both frame the victim.

On the lighting, one key point is I rendered the assassin and her wall separate from the rest of the scene so that I could light her without worrying about the rest of the scene. In the earlier WIPs on the other WIP thread, you'll notice that I only recently changed the rest of the scene lighting to magenta to match the assassin's wall. Of course, the other reason I rendered the scene in two pieces is that back scene is 120MB and takes about 30 minutes to render without the assassin!

Why magenta? It plays well with the yellow of the torch, the neutral colors looked dull and magenta itself came about from the mixing of the orange and blue light on the assassin.

In the back scene, rather than a single magenta light, I actually replaced the single moonlight with a red and orange light at slightly different angles. This was partly so that I could exactly match the magenta in the assassin foreground (which was mixed from orange and blue) but I thought the offset would be interesting to mix in a little direct blue and orange in addition to the magenta. Leaving both lights casting shadows made it look like I had a terrible registration problem so I made the blue light not cast shadows (leaving blue in the orange light's shadows. Maybe the other way would have looked more interesting. I also turned off the orange and blue light shadows on the assassin render leaving only the moonlight shadow.)

Anyway, as you can see I'm not a composition or lighting expert but after trying to figure out what is missing in my scenes, it is the lighting and composition more than the modeling. I could spend all my effort on modeling, become an outrageous modeler and still not get much notice in my pictures if I didn't work on the color/comp as well. It's not that I don't like modeling (just ordered Amapai7!), I just think the main thing missing for my work was the comp and color.

Hope this was of interest.

Marc

PS I'll be traveling for some time and not able to respond for a while.