Working on my environment (19/2/2013)

Using the college computers during reading week I continued to work on my environment.
Throughout my work I also made sure to remove any lines from my original piece that I had either forgotten to remove or had drawn by mistake, thus making the final environment look cleaner and professional. 
You can see the process I got through during the day below.

I used gradients to make the Chinese Lanterns look as if they were glowing. Eventually I plan to add a soft glow around them to confirm they are lights as I did with the Christmas lights.
I then continued to colour in the rest of the floor level of my environment which included the road, pavement, welcome mat, trash can and all its mess.

I then started to choose a colour palette that would best suit an up close building and one meant to be of Chinese design. Therefore, having looked online for reference images I choose to use dark red for its walls and dark green for its roof.
I was able to paint the stain glass window using colours that had their opacity reduced to 50%.

I then experimented with whether to include a background in the scene yet or not, but after finding that it distracted me too much and covered areas I hadn't painted yet I decided to remove it for now.

Recognising that my Christmas lights had gone missing for some reason I made sure to go back to one of my previous back up saves and copy those lights into my scene.
I then decided to colour in the background building furthest away. By doing this I could then compare its light colour scheme to the dark colour scheme in order to come up with the right medium colours for the centre building.
I feel that by doing the above I was able to make the building furthest away look more 'face like' as the use of white and blue for the windows make for good eyes and the colours for the brick work are similar to skin tones.
I also decided to colour in the monster's shadow, slime, gnome, cactus plant, the valve on the roof vent, TV antenna and the top of the water tower during this phase.

Overall I feel that I have done a good day's work. However, I am not 100% sure on the colours I have used for my foreground building as it looks too similar to the closest background building. Even though I intended for the foreground building to be of Mexican design I realise that I may have used the wrong type of window as it looks more Chinese in design. Therefore I looked online to research what Mexican buildings did look like again and noticed that their colour schemes are usually lighter colours such as pink, blue, yellow and/or orange. Therefore I may come back another day and re-colour the foreground building in order for it to not look too much like the Chinese type building I painted already.
I also plan on looking at my background lines as since I reduced the contrast of them they seem quite hard to see. So, I will try and make them clearer for next time although I may not want this as it may once again ruin the perspective of the scene.