How can I improve?

What would I do to make these pictures more real?


Bottom is kind of oblong to me, anyone else?

 

Is it better to go blue nacelle?

 

The revision
The deflector faces where that hole is... curves and is beaded up the ship curature so visible in the gaps. donut deflector

 

More real? Well, they're really blurry which is not helping. How are you painting/rendering these?

 

I just used the "air brush" feature on GIMP a free utility


I tired to add smaller line. Would it clean up the blur a bit? I think Air brush made the hull look blury because of the blending it does. Any suggestions on how to try and get a rendering of frontal hull?

 

Airbrush alone is going to get you fuzzy looking images in general. It's fine for doing things like modeling and shadows,but to paint with it means indistinct edges and details.

 

So... maybe take the ship and use a layered image creation program to outline what I got, then try it from the outlines? I have the old macromedia suite that was for web based design. The image creation tool features a basic render tool and layered image creation. It was all to go with Flash and their web compiler.

 

You might try drawing the ship using lines or filled shapes, then apply use the airbrush to add the highlights a shadows on separate layers that you can dial up and down in transparency, and use the contours of the base drawing to mask off any airbrushing that goes "outside the lines" so to speak.

 

If you can practice with tools for long enough to learn to digitally paint your designs, that would be awesome. It's something I do strive for but have yet to achieve.

For what you're after, have you looked at another free program called Inkscape? It's a vector drawing program. And because it's vector, it's easy to adjust, move, mirror, fill, and layer all sorts of stuff with relative precision. Vector is also infinitely scalable, meaning you can grow or shrink your drawing to any size without loss of detail (if you also adjust your strokes, that is...I tend not to use strokes (or outlines in Coreldraw).

Yes, it is possible to get CS2 (I think), but I believe that Inkscape and even GIMP are beyond Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2... I could be mistaken. I'm sure there are links out there, somewhere.

 

Maybe it would be better to use Inkscape. Try it.

 

Try drawing it out on paper first, take a picture of it with your phone, transfer it to your computer, then work the picture with the programme you're already using.