Reddit reviews Picture This: How Pictures Work (Art Books, Graphic Design Books, How To Books, Visual Arts Books, Design Theory Books)

WHAT?!

Is this for real?!

I haven't figured out yet how to tell who gave me these flattering awards. But when I do, I'm going to thank you shamelessly... extravagantly... to the point of embarrassment!

And thanks to everyone who gave me a uv! It's really gratifying to get a tangible response that tells you that you help flip on that mental lightswitch belonging to something that feels good to their brain. It is a pay-forward - someone else opened my eyes to the neuro side of art, design, and architecture. Now I dig it so much that it feels like a win to share it, and know that the share makes the recipient happy. I'll stop now before I gush.

Here are my best answers to the questions y'all asked.

u/dumpy_potato, asking for resources about this. YES! It's actually been kind of having a moment for a few years. You can find articles in all the places where neuroscientists, and neuropsychologists are likely to talk about designers; which are the same places where designer would never in a hundred years see them. Ain't science great like that?!

At the bottom of this comment, u/magneto_ms, I'm sharing some links to excellent books and articles on the fundamental principles of neuro-visual yada yada, and the way the brain instinctively responds to the sight of various lines, shapes, depictions of depty/height/mass, particular specific objects or things that resemble them, color combinations and contrasts, etc. (Spoiler alert: The instinctive brain really really responds to babies, faces, and genitalia including boobies. After that comes water, then food.)

Killer examples of designs that epitomize these principles - ones that make my eyes pop, and my brain feel good - is the work of Alexa Hamilton. For example, this cover on her book, The Language of Interior Design. Is that not an eye magnet?! Read her brilliant intro, about how good design makes they viewer's eye travel a particular path around the room. (I'm not a fan of her traditional, ornate style. But her composition is bomb.)

The Neuroscience of Design, Psychology Today

Design on the brain: Combining neuroscience and architecture

Evidence Based Design: When Neuroscience, Psychology, and Interior Design Meet

The Integration of Interior Design and Neuroscience: Towards a Methodology to Apply Neuroscience in Interior Spaces (pdf)

This one particularly rocks!
Picture This: How Pictures Work

Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design

I hope some of these deliver on what you're looking for. HMU anytime if I can offer more.

My big advice to you is to take a step back and work on studies from life. It's much better looking than my first digital landscape, so props to that. But there's a lot of work that needs to be done here so I'll try to point stuff out as succinctly as possible (I wish I could do a live crit. It would be so much easier) but here goes.

1. First thing I notice is the chunky mountains in the background. Why? Because your design is telling my eye to go straight there. All the high contrast elements are pointing straight at that mountain. Consider this painting by James Gurney; He's using color, contrast, and guiding lines to direct our eyes to the big city center. Look around and notice how he takes you on a little adventure as one thing points you to another. It's very important for you to direct peoples attention to things you want them to see.
   
2. Overall there is a lot of unbalance in this image. It's very dark and heavy on the left. Not a lot of defined lighting or interesting elements. It's a big dark mass taking up have your visual space with no visual payoff. Consider this work from Ruxing Gao; there are different elements on either side of the painting, however it feels balanced overall. This might be too complex an idea to explain via text. TL;DL Flip/mirror your work. You will see this unbalance.
   
3. There's also a clash of themes. It looks like ruins of some sort, but the elements on the right look Roman/Greek and the elements on the left look almost modern. You should pick one or if you mix themes you need to be able to tell the viewer why or how they mix. And that's hard to do.
   
4. I'm not connecting with any story here. I think I see a little guy fishing? No idea. Not everything you make has to tell a illustrated story like a comic book, but you do need to tell a visual story. What's this about? What are we looking at? Why do you want people to look at this thing? Is is pretty, or interesting, or creepy, or intriguing? Why would someone stop and look at this? "Because I made it" will never be enough. The image has to grab people and tell them something with visuals. For this I recommend Picture This; a book that will take away all the details and simply talk about constructing an image.
   
5. Take this image as a list of things to study. Just about everything here could be better. Start by studying mountain landscapes, work on some architecture, move on to ruins, plant life, but before you do any of that, you need to understand light and color. I recommend this book, it's cheep and well put together. You will learn a lot from this book.
   
   That's all I got for now. If you have any questions I'll try to reply as soon as I see it. Otherwise, hope this helps and pushes you to improve. I do see potential here, if you commit your time and work hard. Cheers

This is a great way to explain composition. I purchased a book awhile ago that gets into these topics in a really cool way, picturing little red riding hood with basic shapes. here

Layout + Color

Picture This by Molly Bang

Typography


Second vote for Elements of Typographic Style, excellent book.


Drawing, honestly at the start the biggest key to growth is going to be drawing as much as you can. You're going to suck for a while so start getting those bad drawings out of you. There's a ton of great people to watch on YouTube (Sycra Yasin, Glenn Vilppu, Stan Prokopenko, Steve Huston). I've seen Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain recommended by many. I'm not crazy about it myself but I didn't read as a beginner artist so I probably didn't get as much out of it as I could have.

I'm also somewhere in the middle. I can never see myself working abstractly, but I don't want to be just another cog in the machine of disney's latest meatgrinder project.

The reason I brought up Piet Mondrian is because he went from very realistic down to the simplest shapes and primary colors. Perhaps shape design is something worth looking into for you.

There's a book.. Well.. I say book, it's more like a leaflet. By Molly Bang on composition and imagery.
https://www.amazon.com/Picture-This-How-Pictures-Work/dp/1452151997

And it's quite interesting in terms of shape design and "shape language". It's a great introduction to the many uses of shapes and perhaps you already know about it, in which case I'm sorry I can't help more. But if you don't want to get into too much on light and form, shapes are a good place to start.