Artist looking for new fun online art forum

Thunderhayt

Hi everyone!

Cheesy introduction thread I guess...I have been doing the online art forum thing for years and while I post a bit on a few more "pro" sites I haven't really found a nice fun place to call a favorite yet, I have been lurking PA for quite a while so I thought it about time to jump in on the action.

I will attach a few game fanart related things first...

Because I miss when vampires were awesome here is some legacy of kain/ soul reaver stuff



and a link to my full portfolio for those interested: https://www.artstation.com/artist/rayph

so all in all HOWDY

-Rayph

Golden Yak

Gasp! Rayph! I started following your blogspot back when I found all those Warhammer concepts on it. Welcome to PA - those Legacy of Kain pieces are pretty spectacular.

Iruka

Hey, Welcome!

The AC focus mainly on critique, so if you are working on anything specific, or are looking for crits in a specific area, it's always good to put those up front. For people with a more established and generally working style, there will be some reluctance to provide feedback if everything feels like "well maybe that's what he was going for."

There's some places on these images where your edges are fuzzy and it doesn't strike me as a stylistic choice Like the cloth on soul reaver's arm, or the shoulder-cloth on the top guy. It looks like you are adding in your light but not going back in to clean up the edges after the fact. The light bouncing off edges could be intended to be a bloom effect, but I think places like this:

Just look like an errant brush stroke.

There's so much going on in terms of detail that I could understand wanting to soften some features to control the image focus, but there are other ways to achieve that effect without fuzzing/blurring edges.

Scosglen

Hello, welcome to the AC

Cool work, you have some neat stuff in your portfolio too. Judging from your extensive portfolio you seem like a big boy, so I think you can probably handle a little critique out the gate. We are very critique and improvement oriented around here.

Your drawing and design sense seems pretty good, but I'm noticing some patterns related to how you render and think about light in a lot of your pieces. Specifically there are a lot of pieces where every detail seems to have been given similar extremes of contrasting value and sharpness, and the end result can look very "busy" and harm the sense of overall 3D form-- a bit of a "missing the forest for the trees" situation. It's almost as if you're sometimes rendering from A->B->C->D rather than thinking about the light from A->D, if that makes any sense.

In these posted pieces in particular, I'm talking about stuff like how every furrow and fold on Kain's body is lavished with nearly as much modeling as his actual facial features. You also seem to really like to go hog wild with rim lights, speculars, and core shadows on almost any form that seems like it could have one, sometimes even when it might not really make sense with the light. For example, Kain's shoulder cloth that has a dark core shadow precisely in the direction where it seems the scene light is projecting from, but really it's all over the place.

In many of your simpler character design pieces this stuff isn't really a big deal and reads as a harmless comic-inspired aesthetic, but as you move into the fuller illustration pieces with more complex compositions, the rendering starts to reveal its issues. Sometimes it's enough to represent a genuine problem, like in the Raziel piece when we look at the upper arm and where it connects to his torso. There's so much detail, so much modeling happening in this one small part of the canvas that it all nearly cancels itself out and instead is just very flat looking, and there's so much detail noise that it's difficult to actually even parse what is happening between the anatomy and costume here.

Thunderhayt

This is some great feedback guys and definitely the kind of stuff I am looking for! Thanks!

Geth

Geth detected banned alias
Reason: KEB, Euphony, Vociferous

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple.
Thunderhayt

Iruka

Pretty sure that's a false positive, sometimes geth is a bit overeager. I'll see if we can wrangle that one.

Thunderhayt

Ugh yea said I was banned and un-banned? Odd...

Iruka

Geth is still learning, sometimes he just cant tell one fleshy human from another. It might trigger again in the meantime, but I let our admin know.

Anyway, glad the feedback is what you are looking for. I think @Scosglen really hit the nail on the head with his crit, I hope you stick around and show us your progress.