/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

Somehow I make huge gains when I do fully painted and rendered pieces. I'm fantastic at fabric, decent at human elements like hair and skin, but I still struggle with backgrounds. Because my brain thinks in 3D quite well but with backgrounds I can't just render every leaf or brick with that 3D thinking or it'd take an eternity to do. I try breaking down things like trees into general shapes like bunches of leaves. But theres a certain way that impressionistic painters blend those shapes together naturally that I can't wrap my head around. I love slightly impressionistic painterly looks where brush strokes are noticeable but only when you look closely. Like certain anime backgrounds. I'm not giving up on it, I'm trying to study the brushwork and the blending but it's hard to find examples of exactly what I want every time. It's not like anime backgrounds depict all the exact same kinds of things I see here in the US. If I want a closely detailed rendition of an American long needle pine I have to look at photos and guess how the brushstrokes should be impressed. Finding an exact gauche rendition of the exact kind of thing I want to paint, from any number of hundreds of thousands of anime, of which I only know a handful, is a Herculean task. Especially with unique lighting. Search engines just give me wallpaper-tier stuff with too much post-processing, or ghibli stuff.
Also cliff faces and rocks that aren't smooth are confusing. It feels like a lot of painters just wing it with the shadows. Trying to get out of the 3D headspace there too, and also just wing it through pure technique. I can't invest in every crack or pebble for something that isn't the focal point.
I won't give up, I refuse to. It's an exhilarating challenge. At the very least I can balance my background frustrations with rendering focal points I know I do well. I feel good when I look at my crisp contrast between layers of hair and subtle shadows rolling over fabrics. It keeps me going.