the art style is very calven and hobesy.... i love it <3

That obvious, eh? x3 I would be lying if I said there was no influence there. I'm looking for a way of painting that doesn't take large amount of time to render a scene but can still support fairly crisp detail. Comic artists just happen to need exactly that, and Bill happens to have worked in watercolours I believe, so it seemed like a good place to start looking for ideas.

i can fully agree with you on that, i've always loved his art <3

I think you did great

Good eyes! It looked kind of familiar to me too but I couldn't place it. :)

Glad it wasn't just me. Is preeetty, though.

I was thinking the same thing when I saw it. :) And Ru, this is very nice.

That was exactly my thought!

I like, it, keep up the work.

>Oh that looks wonderful, could be straight out of a book. Very moody :)

Heh, thank you! Needs some work, but I'm doin' my best. :3

looks beautiful

Reminds me of "Calvin and Hobbes".

That's no accident. :P

This!! So many memories. <3
Very well done, Ruaidri!

Awesome looking place.

Очень красиво!

I HAET U RU.
I hate you because you said you're not good at bgs >_>
you damn lier >^>!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
IAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
(I love it ;w;)

I'm not. x3 This is a subject matter I've already done fairly often and know how to do, and even then it's not a great result. Just wait until I start trying to do stuff I'm not used to, then you'll see. :P

>//3//< It's super perfect!

Anyway, you'll do it amazing, trust on yourself, we already do :3 <3 x3!!

TOLDYA :D

Told me what? x3

To do backgrounds and landscapes.

Like, a year or two ago :P

Reminds me of Whinnie the Pooh

This is so crisp and quite simply gorgeous. I love stuff like this a lot more than the photorealism. Excellent work!

Realism is boring. Artistically impressive sure, but boring. If I want realism I'd just take a picture and be done with it! x3

True fact, sir, true fact. There used to be a tv commercial for Art Institutes or some school like that here where they showed a guy doing all kinds of realistic pencil drawings and it was supposed to impress you that he was a Real Artist, but they just ended up looking dull and lifeless.

no porn? booo!

no kust kidding love the colours and you have put a slight accent in the bottom with the yellow when the sun appears!

it looks very nice! love it.

Looks like watercolor and ink but put it together it's EPIC!!!

*CLAPS HAPPILY* EPIC JOB ON IT!!!

Oh, wow. That's gorgeous.

oh nice. you did an amazing job on this.

Ooh, very pretty. As so many others have said, it does sort of remind me of Watterson's work, though I think there's plenty of your own style in there as well. I quite like how you painted the trees, both the ones close to the "camera" and the ones further off in the distance. It really gives you a sense of being there in that forest, just waiting to discover whatever is over that slight rise. I don't know how realistic you want to be able to go with these, but I think that something like this would compliment your character work very well, and I've always thought that the slightly cartoony look of your backgrounds in general made them a lot of fun.

Anyway. I'm glad that you were able to get some good suggestions out of that journal, and that this turned out so well for you!

Very, very pretty! I especially like the background and the overall softness—very peaceful.

~Fox

Worth it! *Faved* Ahahah, I like landscapes when they look like this, I admit.

It's so pretty! I want to live there!

Ooooo very cool XD

This is awesome!!! I love it!

They aren't "Happy Trees", so right there, you gain 3049562430 points.

The rest of the Interenet's point..you get those too.

Superb.

Not a Ross fan? x3

Everything looked exactly the same...he used the same colors, the same brushes, the same mocking words. He had his style, and it never changes; he never seemed to show that you could get better by doing different things. If he was teaching beginners, he was pretty damn good; however, he never wet above that level. I know it was just a PBS show, and probably was just supposed to be for teaching, but I never saw any specials for him to show what he really could do.

And then he sold out with the Bob Ross Painting Kit, sold in stores all over the place. *eyerolls*

Honestly I kind of agree. I started watching his stuff at one point. For the first few episodes I was really impressed, but then I slowly realized it wasn't going anywhere. After the first season I figured I got everything I was going to get out of it and just stopped watching.

It's also pretty apparent that he didn't really know how to do anything structural. I suffer from this as well a bit- random trees and shrubs are a lot easier the straight lines and fine details. But I saw one of his episodes where there was a building as the focal point, and the building looks pretty terribad. I feel kind of horrible bad mouthing Ross, he seemed like a really chill dude, but it didn't seem like there was a lot of depth to his paintings...

'course, there's not a huge amount of depth to my work either, let's be clear. x3

Well, you're doing at least one more thing than he ever did in his paintings..you draw "people" (i.e Furries). I never saw any people in his paintings..not even in the background. He just did landscapes and sunsets (with trees in the foreground). A friend of mine called him a "Treehugger" and thinking back, yeah, but in a different sense (Oh look..a tree!) ;)

Even Monet, who made a living off of his "waterlilies" series *swoons* put peeps into his backgrounds often. But that lonely pine suddenly became a whole clump of trees, obscuring whatever he started out to paint.

Gotta love that twig-on-twig action.

> The bottom half I was completely lost on, so I just sorta made stuff up as I went.
The technical term for this I think is "abstracting," hehe ...

Seems OK to me. To add more depth I think it needs more small trees far off into the distance, or maybe more layers of "leaf blobs," but it's not like you were wanting a high level of detail in the first place. I also think to recreate some of the detail-ish-ness of the source you need deeper color contrasting in the swathes of color suggesting grass on the floor. IMHO anyway.

I like how you made the small branches(?) in front stand out with the white.

But idk - you got a pleasant light, airy style in the color/shading + linework of your artwork and this comes through here.

It's all foresty and stuff

It looks really good to me. I think you did a great job for just practice.

Gotta love scenery ^_^

I think someone else mentioned it too, very C&H inspired! Came out awesome :)

Looks like my back yard. ^ω^
You say backgrounds give you trouble, but I would say you've done damn good ... Or maybe I just don't have an artistic enough eye to spot flaws. The Watterson-ish style is very alluring, it makes snow look less cold and evil. Haha.
God stuff, mang!

<.<....... And I need to turn the brightness down on my screen. Coulda swore that grass was snow the first time. I blame the cold... It gets to me. *twitch*

I guess I can see how that mistake might be made, but giving your monitor a quick calibration mightn't hurt either. :P It's a subtle green, but definitely green on my screen! But hey, thanks! I'm glad ya like it, snow and all. ;P

I can't see that as green either, and no, I'm not colorblind. That is definitely a light bluish shade as far as I can see it, and I have no idea how to fix my color balance. Looks very good though!

This looks great. Nice work!

I can comfortably tell you that this is in deed exactly what forests look like here in Alaska.

Except this must be in springtime or something, because normally the forests are blanketed in several inches to several feet of snow, depending on where you are in the state, the amount of foliage and branch coverage, the weather on that particular day, what side of the street you're on, and whether or not you asked the forest to look a little prettier before you took the shot.

Sounds... cold. I don't think I could deal with Alaska. I may be Canadian, but it's already too cold for me here in NS. I'd be quite happy if I lived somewhere where it never got cold enough to snow. x3

Looks absolutely amazing! Great job!

It's beautiful :)
I also love how you made it snowy :)

Thanks! But... it shouldn't look snowy. It's a soft green, but it's definitely green... x3

Odd. I checked it on a few screens, and it is bluish and someplaces, even purplish, as if snow in the sunset.

There are definitely blue and purple hues in places, it'd look pretty bland as a uniform green hue. I wanted the overall effect to be a sort of cool green though. I thought I got it, but maybe not. x3

Or maybe it's just me ;) You know... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rorschach_test :)

You really, seriously have some talent here, Ruaidri. Just gorgeous

This is pretty great. I'd recommend putting more of those yellow highlights in the front and decreasing the saturation in the back though, might make it look more like you're looking into a forest than at a canvas.

...the reason I'm saying this is because I know you have the technical skill to accomplish it. It's not as if I could actually paint this. XD

This is pretty amazing, Ru! I'd love to see more scenes like this from you ^.^

This is amazing. Makes me think of places I'd like to live in. I do have to ask, would you be interested in selling this, or a print at least? This is a piece I'd hang on my wall. :)

Sure! It'll just sort of sit in a pile here. Make me an offer and if it's reasonable, it's yours. :P

I'll have to wait until Friday to pay for it, but I'd offer you $40, American, plus the cost of shipping it on top.

Yeah, I think I can do 40. Drop me a note when you're ready to sort out payment stuffs. :3

Alright, I'll note you Friday when my check clears. :3

I must say this is amazing and very accurate to Alaska's forests. It looks like that up here now as we just got snow the last two days.
A+ from the coyote in Alaska

Walking in a winter wonder land. Amazing work.