Before you can use a landscape, you have to understand them. Have no fear, this post will equip you with everything you need to know. Pt 1 of 2.

Image by Leonhard Niederwimmer from Pixabay

This is the third of my time-out posts in between the Trade In Fantasy series.

I made the time-out logo from two images in combination: The relaxing man photo is by Frauke Riether and the clock face (which was used as inspiration for the text rendering) Image was provided by OpenClipart-Vectors, both sourced from Pixabay.

Artists have been painting landscapes for a very long time, and there’s a good reason for that – nothing captures the total essence of a view or a location in quite the same way. Today’s post will give you the tools and knowledge to analyze a landscape image. Part 2, next week, will link campaigns and landscapes (both real and metaphoric) to show just what can be done with them – and what should be done, and why you might want to do so.

Orientation

Let’s start here: in art and documents, there are two basic orientations: Portrait and Landscape. Understanding the difference and why they are used the way that they are can be very helpful. Most art classes from 7th grade up (if not sooner) will cover this, but a lot of people won’t have paid attention or recognized the relevance, so starting with something fundamental seems like a good idea. Gets everyone on the same page, if nothing else (pun intended).

Most paper / images are rectangular in shape, with one longer axis and one shorter. In the US, the two most common page sizes are Letter and Legal, while in many other places, A4 is the go, and Foolscap is a legacy measurement from pre-metric times that still pops up here and there. Here are scale representations of all four, side-by-side:

If you look very closely, you’ll be able to see that the first three are all the same width (where that standard came from, I have no idea) but different lengths, obviously, while A4 is a little narrower and a little longer than letter size.

The exact measurements are:

• Legal (US) = 8.5″ (21.59 cm) × 14″ (35.56 cm)
• Foolscap = 8.5″ (21.59 cm) × 13.5″ (34.3 cm)
• Letter (US) = 8.5″ (21.59 cm) × 11″ (27.94 cm)
• A4 = 21 cm (8.27″) × 29.7 cm (11.67″)

A4 is defined by an international standard, ISO-216. The length of the long side is 2^0.5 × the length of the short side, for reasons that are far too technical to go into at the moment. The key point is that if you fold a sheet of A-sized paper in half along the long side, you get two sheets of the next A-size. A0 is defined as being 1 square meter in size (within rounding limits), so A1 is 1/2 m^2 and so on. You can also sometimes get larger sizes, such as “A-1” and “A-2” (read as “A minus 1” and “A minus 2”.

There is also a B-series and C-series of sizes, the latter defined by a different standard, but they are comparatively rare. In fact, there are two VB-series – Japan uses one different to the rest of the world.

While I’m on the subject of sizes, there are a couple of elephants in the room that need to be addressed.

Exotic Sizes

These are emphatically not the only sizes that can be encountered. In fact, they probably even the most common when you look at the totality of images to be considered. So I need to mention a few of the others that will commonly be encountered.

Screen Size

And the most common one is this – the standard screen aspect ratio, and the series of sizes, measured in screen pixels, that derive from it. 1024 × 768 and 1920 × 1080 are probably the most common sizes, but there are many more.

Of course, there is a difference between Image Size and Paper Size – but an image has to fit into the space provided by the display medium. That could be a screen (which is where these sizes come from) or it could be a sheet of paper (for a hardcopy image).

It must also be mentioned that paper printing requires a much higher resolution (pixels per inch or dots per inch) than any sort of monitor that you can point at. Standard screen resolution is 72 dpi, better is 96 dpi, and the minimum for full photographic quality is generally regarded as 300 dpi (though 120 dpi is sometimes used for low-resolution diagrams and 1200 dpi for extremely high-resolution images).

Artists and editors have to be continually concerned with how an image is to be displayed and what compromises are necessary for optimum usage.

If I have a 3000-pixel wide image, at 300dpi, that would be 10 inches across. If it’s a mere 1024-wide, that’s only 3.4133 inches across – at photo resolution. If I were to print that 1024-pixel-wide image 10.24 inches across, that’s a resolution of just 100 pixels per inch – and the printed image will be a little blurry, having only 1/3 the ideal print resolution.

The downside to high resolution images is file size. A 1024 × 768 image is 786,432 pixels in size, and there generally are three color values for each pixel, so that’s 2,359,296 pieces of information, each 24-bits long for full color = 56,623,104 bits; divide by 8 to get bytes, divide by 1024 to get K, divide by 1024 again to get Megs = 6.75 Mb.

Displayed at 72 pixels per inch, that’s an image 14.222 inches across and 10.667 inches high; if printed at 300 dpi, the image shrinks to 3.4133 inches × 2.56 inches high. If, on the other hand, the image is designed for printing, the file size will be × 300^2 / 72^2 = × 17.3611 file size, and without zooming in so that you can’t see the whole image, there will be details too small for you to see on a standard monitor.

It’s a constant juggling act.

But screen size is a natural size for digital artists to work at.

The other screen size to mention is the ratio of 16:9, which are the relative dimensions size of widescreen TVs. Most photographic and digital art won’t use this unless the image was always intended to be displayed that way, and it’s quite common to photo/draw larger and crop to the needed dimension.



This image compares the proportions of A4 and Widescreen.

1024 × 748 or 1200 × 760?

Like most computer users, part of my screen real estate is taken up with a toolbar – I keep mine two rows tall and at the bottom of the screen. When I am preparing an image for reference / display in a gaming session, I need to subtract the size of that toolbar from the height permitted for the image, if I want it to appear full-screen.

Technically, it’s roughly 1024 × 748 – but I have found that 1200 × 760 is close enough with the software that I use. So an awful lot of the images that I create for my own use have those dimensions.

Square

When it comes to art, there are all sorts of alternative sizes, and square images are not uncommon, because these canvasses are comparatively easy to make. I’ll get into some of the consequences in an aside a little later, but for now, I’ll simply mention them and move on.

Panoramic Sizes

Panoramic sizes are image sizes that are deliberately wider than the display can show IF the image is full-sized vertically. This permits scrolling from one side to another, a manually-controlled “pan” across the image. This can be extremely useful in a game because it presents a general impression and then elements within the landscape that would have distracted from that general impression.

Where it falls down is when you have to show it to multiple people – unless they can all see the screen at the same time.

You can get around that by actually turning it into a gif or a movie, if you know what you’re doing and have the tools required for the job. These used to be phenomenally expensive, but there are freeware / open-source alternatives for almost everything these days. I can’t vouch for how easy they are to use, though.

I have made a few using online tools, and especially to morph between multiple still images or variations. Unfortunately, these are all based on copyrighted images, so I can’t really offer any examples to show readers.

Tower Proportions

The final size to mention is any image that is designed to be taller than the available display at whatever width is intended – it could be full screen width, or it could be something smaller. Like the Panoramic pan, this permits a vertical scroll to reveal new details and the occasional surprise. This is an effect that I have used a couple of times here at Campaign Mastery.

There’s the image that goes with Fuzzy Plastic Memories III – Application, which depicts a man digging for Free Worms. But as you scroll down, you discover that he is about to discover a Treasure Chest. And, if he keeps going, a Pyramid. And, if he keeps digging below that, Dinosaur Bones. This, of course, is symbolic of serendipity.

Or, there is 2012’s Exceeding the Extraordinary: The Meaning Of Feats – at first, it’s hard to even recognize what you’re looking at, but as you scroll down, you realize that it’s cliff being defied by a bare-chested climber. Scroll down a little further and you get a hint of how far he’s already come.

And then there’s Godzilla’s Eye, from Creating ecology-based random encounters: This Eats That… the unrelieved blackness above and below give the subconscious impression that the image size (relative to the eye) is representative of the head size (relative to the eye). You get the sense that the creature is too large to be contained within the panel, and since the eye is much larger than a human eye, that the creature it belongs to is both huge and right in front of you. The blackness above and below magnify the menace, many-fold.

Portrait Orientation

Okay, so we have our paper sizes – and a plentiful array of them, there are. For the rest of this post, though, I’m going to stick with the original four.

There are two basic ways to orient one of these pieces of paper when they contain an image. The one that’s less relevant in terms of the subject of today’s post is Portrait Orientation, so it marks a relatively simple place to start.

Portrait orientation gets its name from the fact that it is dimensionally-suited to focusing on an individual, and therefore is suitable for Portraits, as I’m sure most people will either know or be able to deduce (that said, I’ve had to explain it to some in the past!)

Eye-line

If you draw a line from an upper corner of a sheet of paper in portrait orientation at a perfect 45 degrees, and note where it crosses the mid-line of the page, you will find the eye-line of the sheet. This is a line across the page that represents where the viewer subconsciously places their perspective.

Like this:



The first thing to note is that because the first three all have the same width, the eye-line is in the same place relative to the top of the page for all three. The difference to the eye-line of the A4 page is barely visible, but it’s there – I’ve put an enlargement underneath to make it clearer.

If a horizon line is above this line, those viewing the image will feel like they are looking down. If the horizon line is below it, those viewing the image will feel like they are looking up. This effect can be reinforced with 3D perspective, or contradicted by it; in the latter case, viewers will feel there’s something wrong with what they are seeing but most won’t be able to identify what the problem is. This can be very useful – if you don’t have an artist among your players!

More importantly, if the image is a portrait, and the eyes are above the Eye-line, it creates an impression of height greater than that of the viewer, while below it, the viewer gets the impression that the subject is shorter than they are (potentially quite a lot shorter). This, in turn, is generally used to interpret visually the broadness of the image – a narrow character is thin, even emaciated, if they are tall, and even smaller if they are short, while a broad character is huge if tall and just wide if short.

The other major difference lies in how much of the image lies below the eye-line. This dictates how much space there is for the visible part of the image – if the head is 1/3 of the width of the page, you may see the subject’s chest except with legal or foolscap, which might take you down far enough to see their belt. If the head is smaller, so will the rest of the body be – so you’ll get to see more of it at a larger size using a larger sheet of paper.

Landscape Orientation

Things abruptly grow more complicated when we’re talking about Landscape orientation, because all these paper sizes are of different widths when they are rotated 90 degrees.



 

Eye-line

Readers should start by observing that our 45-degree line is now coming from the bottom of the page, not the top.

With Legal and Foolscap sizes, there’s not a whole lot of room to put a horizon line above the eye-line. Even putting one anywhere close to the eye-line is still going to focus attention on the land and not the sky. Which is fine if that’s what you want – but trouble if there’s something in the sky of interest.

Letter and A4 sizes offer greater flexibility – there’s a bigger gap between the top of the page and the eye-line.

Horizon Line

Because it’s important, let’s now show three more sets of images: One set with a horizon above the eye-line, one at the eye-line, and one below the eye-line:




These sets of layouts are Horizon above eye-line, Horizon at eye-line, horizon below eye-line, and horizon well below eye-line. There are three things to notice about them: the relative importance of ground-content vs sky-content, the emphasis on the horizon itself, and the impression of viewer’s height above ground..

The shorter the page width, the more importance can be attached to the sky (because it takes up more space on the page). The closer to the mid-way point of the page, the more importance is placed on the shape of the horizon itself – i.e. the more the image is about context and where the ground-content is located and the less about what that ground-content is.

These are fairly subtle effects, but they can make a big difference. Or, to put it another way, consider the Letter and A4 ‘well below the eye-line’ examples – with that much sky being shown, there had darned well better be something important in that sky to justify it!

Natural Eye Movement

With that all explained, it’s time to add another complication – one that I’ve discussed before (in Image Compositing Project No 3, a Blue Monkey, I think it was), but which bears a little recap: If you are used to reading left-to-right, then when you see an image, your eyes enter about 1/3 of the way down from the top and on the left-hand side, and travel to the right until they encounter something that redirects that motion.

If your training is to read from right-to-left, your eyes enter an image from the right and track left.

A lot of planning and design goes into manipulating the passage of the observer’s eye. Put something with strong contrast that extends down the page at some point, and the eye will follow it until it encounters something else. You can, through the careful structuring of image content, either induce the viewer’s eye to traverse the four corners of the image and land, repeatedly, at the point of central focus – the middle half of the image in the top 2/3, and centered there.

At least, that’s what happens with Portrait Orientation.

With Landscape Orientation, that central focus is a region almost as wide as the image itself. And that permits greater structural flexibility – the focal point of the image doesn’t have to be near the center, it can be off to one side (as it was in the Blue Monkey example linked to above), and the rest of the image is there to give that focal point context.

It’s when you consider these effects in relation to the 16 diagrams above that the importance becomes clearer, and the reasons for the impact on the relative importance of ground vs sky. This also explains the “horizon effect” – if the horizon lies sufficiently above or below this initial line of passage, then it is deemed less important by the viewer (all completely subconsciously).

Unusual Orientations

Of course, artists love to break the rules and see what happens. Let’s take an A4 sheet and tilt it so that the horizon line runs more or less corner-to-corner. It’s what happens when we straighten it back again that gets interesting:



With the angled image, we pay attention to the top right corner and not much more – at least without some very clever design, such as using the space at the sides as negative space and ‘bouncing’ the eye off it. But straightening it back, the eye naturally follows the horizon down and to the right, giving a sense that we are banking to the right and therefore turning in that direction.

In the third image, I’ve added something else flying – I did a simple aircraft shape, but it could be anything – and positioned it parallel to the top of the page. As a result, not only is there a sense that we are in motion, there is a sense that the other object is in independent motion, because it appears to be banking in the opposite direction to us.

The wider the sheet of paper, the less extreme the bank angle that results from corner-to-corner horizons, and the less intense and more subtle the sense of movement – and perhaps, more realistic, as well. But we can achieve the same effect by applying a smaller angle to the horizon line, completely controlling it.

And that’s with an absolutely flat horizon; manipulating it by adding in peaks and valleys can heighten the effect, and making the horizon a curve further increases it.

To some extent, even without tilting the page, a similar effect can be achieved by greater variation in horizon. Here’s an A4 with a large mountain range to one side:



But mostly, what an asymmetric image does is focus attention on the Asymmetry itself. In the example above, it’s the ruggedly steep mountain on the right – It’s green from bottom to top, so it’s not that tall, but in every other way, it presents as exceptional. And there’s just a hint of a second one behind it and to the right. Everything else in the image is there to provide context to that mountain – the dead-looking forest maze in the foreground, and the distant snow-covered peaks, both tell you something more about the mountain.

It didn’t have to be a mountain; it could have been a tropical scene with one palm tree much closer to the viewer (and hence rising above the treeline). That would use the palm as a representation of the climate and a matching lifestyle and culture.

Depth Of Field

The other thing that this example does is present depth of field. You have something close up that is camera-blurred so much that it’s hard to make out – a hedge maze of very narrow passages with a lot of vertical rise and fall; you have the dominant element in focus, and behind the maze, making it further away and hence of greater size and importance; you have the snowy mountains behind the focal point, so they are farther away, and hence much bigger even though they take up less space in the mage; and you have a lot of wind-swept sky behind that, suggesting that wind might complicate any attempt to conquer the dominant mountain.

Without depth, a place feels like a superficial impression. We are so used to depth of field being present that the mind takes any opportunity to accept its existence. Take another look at the ground texture in the earlier examples – it’s very simple one but perspective has been employed to once again present depth of field; the horizon is further away and the landscape feels ‘lumpier’, more 3-dimensional, as a result – and that tells you something more about the content even though it’s just areas of light and shadow, bereft of significant detail.

Unusual Shapes

There are other things that can be done. Unusual shapes, for example, can imply all sorts of things going on, using the visual shorthand of comic books – sometimes so subtly that you aren’t even aware of it happening, for example by thickening the borders in a fluid way, or introducing distortions and rotations in 3D

Going any deeper into that subject is not something to be done casually; there’s very limited information available and it would demand weeks or months of experimentation to even begin work.

The Impact of Ovals

There’s one exception to that, and that’s an Oval shape. I don’t have to delve into this at all, because I’ve already done so, in my article on All about Frames ? Merry Christmas!.

In a nutshell: the corners of an image are generally where the least important or immediate content is located. In some images, we’re only really aware of them subconsciously. A round frame strips them away and surrounds them with negative (empty) space – which suggests one of three things: either there’s nothing of importance in those corners, or there’s something there that would distract from the focus of the image, or there’s something there that for some other reason, the artist wants to hide from the viewer. It’s a literal expression of tunnel vision.

Remember the tilted-frame demonstration? The eye gets repelled by that negative space, so an oval or round edge induces a natural trend for the eye to follow the edge of that negative space, circling the image over and over, and never actually paying much attention to the focal point of the image:



This illustrates a hard oval edge or frame. What this does is de-emphasize whatever is at the focal point, underplaying it. If it’s not something of great importance or significance, the framing only adds to that impression; but if it were a T-Rex or an oncoming train or a Gothic castle, it’s suggestive that these things are so ubiquitous that they are almost un-noteworthy. That’s a profound implication.

But there is a price to pay – all in the visual information that would have been present in the shaded corners has been excised, and that’s a lot – it totals about 1/3 of the total image space.



The same thing happens where a soft border has been used. To illustrate it, here’s another Foolscap landscape, one created by stretching the Asymmetric A4 example from earlier. Aside from a central panel, I have successive blurred and faded the edges to create a soft oval.

This has a completely different effect – the focus shifts completely to the spot indicated in the center. Our eye tracking starts above this line and tracks to the right until it hits the edge of the green mountain, when it gets pulled down and left toward the focal point. And suddenly, an almost-insignificant detail, only one or two pixels wide, becomes the most important element in the whole image: what appears to be a very distant path or trail between the mountains. It’s just below our focal point, but the eye gets led to it naturally. Suddenly all the context isn’t about the green mountain, it’s about that mountain pass – and the green mountain itself is just another addition to that context. What’s more, what looked like a forest maze now looks a bit more like what I intended it to be in the first place, a rocky cliff or range of hills between the viewer and the green mountain.

As Mr Spock might have said, “Fascinating.”

Application in Illustration

Photographers have a limited set of options to work with. They generally have to accept whatever nature offers them, within the limits of camera angles, lighting, content, and natural framing. But they can take 1000 photos a fraction of a second apart and throw 999 of them away, if they have to (in practice, 3-5 would be more common, and usually with different cameras just in case there’s something wrong with one of them – like having left the lens-cap on. Even pro’s occasionally make that mistake!)

Artists and illustrators have no such excuse. If there’s something visible in an artwork, you more-or-less have to assume that it’s been put there deliberately, at least until informed otherwise – which is the artist wearing his limitations on his sleeve.

The artist is under an entirely different set of constraints, instead. Constraints of ability, of rendering, of design, of purpose, of tools, of techniques, and of time. It takes a fraction of a second for a photographer to capture an image; it can take hours – minimum – for an artist to render an image. Days and weeks are more common.

The time restriction is probably the biggest one, in many respects. It means that you can’t adopt anything close to the shotgun approach possible to a photographer; you might only have time to execute three or four rough designs and one finished artwork a week – or a month.

But there are some advantages to compensate. A pencil can depict anything that the artist can think of. It’s only a question of whether or not the artist has the ability and the techniques to transfer what he’s thinking of from the imagination to the page.

Entering the story at this point and complicating everything are digital art softwares. They make things possible that were almost impossible previously, and do it in a fraction of the time. But they can also create some absolutely appalling messes, and there’s a steep learning curve (at least at first) – actually, there are probably several that have to mostly be tackled all at the same time. I’ve touched on a few of them in this article – resolution and file formats and so on. Infinitely-adjustable page sizes can be both a blessing and a curse, requiring an entirely new skill: the ability to match a particular image size to a desired image design.

And, just starting to make it’s presence felt, the latest tool is AI. I’ve played around with the technology to know that:

• It’s a whole new skill-set.
• Getting one to cough up anything even vaguely related to what you want is difficult-to-impossible.
• When it works, the results can be incredible.
• When it doesn’t, they can be appalling.
• The state of the art has severe and usually unstated limitations – some of which you may be able to dance around.
• Almost inevitably, manual ‘tweaking’ of the results are necessary to achieve a satisfactory result. Sometimes a little, often a lot.

Some of those limitations bear mentioning. AIs have great difficulty with counting and normality – four fingers on one hand and six on the other. AIs have difficulty separating requirements into depth layers – “in the background,” is something they struggle with. In fact, any sort of relationship between objects and scene is often difficult. Action shots are frequently not possible – ask for a crashed flying saucer and it will just give you a flying saucer over a crater or burn mark. Distances are something they don’t really understand, either – we think of images as depicting objects located in a three-dimensional space; it doesn’t think of them as objects in space at all. There are more, but that’s quite enough to be getting on with.

One of my favorite tests is “a Kzin tourist in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses.” The best I’ve gotten has been an orange-haired house-cat. Sometimes with a human-skinned torso.

Right now, at best, it’s a tool for a specialist artist. Often, it’s not even that.

And that’s where I’m going to draw the curtain closed for this article, which has grown immensely in the course of its development. Nothing that you have read today is part of the original 11-line outline that defined this article; today has been all about giving the non-artist the tools to analyze landscapes. In part 2, we’ll put those tools to good use as I move on to how non-artists can USE landscapes!