Snow-Covered Field With A Harrow

To start things off, we can take a look at Van Gogh's "Snow Covered Field With A Harrow. It was hard to find a photo worth anything, because it's either captured using tilt-shift photography (which distorts two-thirds of the painting) or is a flat unrestored picture. We'll be needing the restoration today, because the main object of the picture is color: a bleak, snowy landscape, consisting of proper proportions of blinding white and ice blue. So, without further ado:

Works well, doesn't it? Let's point a few things out.

That blinding white I spoke of? Nowhere to be seen. Almost all of the white in the picture is tinged a not-so-faint blue, as well as being quite gray. We're going for a low-saturation approach here. Notice, however, that as you get closer to the horizon, the landscape gets bluer, and just a bit more saturated.

Also notice that the shadows in this picture are blue's opposite, yellow. Chromatic opposites (colors across from each other on the color wheel) complement each other well, but only when they have the same brightness and saturation (which here is light pastel). For reference, if I remember correctly, in the Windows color picker, the vertical axis in the color square is saturation, and the bar at the right (left?) is brightness.

What can we learn from this? Well, wintry landscapes should be, if you are going for bleak as opposed to vibrant, pastel (low saturation), and medium-light. True white shouldn't actually exist anywhere in the composition, instead replaced by a very light shade of blue. Similarly, true black should only be used in bare outlines, shadows instead composed of complementary yellow (that is, only drag the slider horizontally, not vertically). The picture should darken and saturate towards the top, then, when it breaks into an HDMA gradient, start over again, going from yellow to blue (looking bottom up, because that's the way the player is looking).

Now that we have so nicely postulated on color, let's look at form. The landscape is largely uniform; whatever isn't part of it is a vague, black shape, etched in lines but not quite detailed. There are no clouds; the desolation is complete, nothing offering the consolation of life-giving precipitation. In there place we have these crows, a favorite thing of our dear friend van Gogh's. This would work well with ExAnimation, methinks.

So, we should make our foreground objects very dark, lacking most detail. Our scenery should be sparse, and, likewise, dark and vague. The landscape should be flat, with nothing to to pollute the monotony.

I sincerely hope you enjoy this out-elementalisation of some guy's artistic work, and that your hacking benefits from it!