Sum Fantasy Art from Mr. Kingery

Joshuaking

Ive been working alot lately on my comic books but I got a few single pieces to look at too. Let me know what you think.

Arden Canelo

I can't say too much because I stopped liking high fantasy works a few months ago, but your saturation seems too high in your colors, might wanna tone those down some. That's also a pretty big huge signature you have on your pics, like, is it for a watermark? Oh, and I see photoshop filters, don't wanna use those! Maybe that's helpful?

tynic

In terms of colour, composition and lighting, there's a huge discrepancy in skill between that puppet pic and ... well, all the others. Whatever you were doing there is working. The rest are just generic fantasy poses with oversaturated colours and weird lighting ... seriously, where are those bright, white specular highlights coming from in the first picture? The sun is behind her.

Joshuaking

Hmmm never been told I use too much color before hehe. I guess its not for everyone. But I can see what your saying. Most of my teachers were always pushing contrast in colors and tones. Tynic your right about the lighting on the first image. I drew and colored the elf then added the background quickly without really thinking about it much. Just didnt want the white background. Most of these, the backgrounds were done seperate. And yes thats a watermark, just got into the habit of doing that with everything I put online. Ive had work stolen before and now im a bit paranoid. Thank you both for the input.

m3nace

I don't really get the thing with watermarks... I couldn't care less about someone proclaiming my art is theirs, it sorta screams "I only do art because people will think I'm awesome and god forbid people praise the wrong person" I'm not sure that's how an artist that does art for the sake of the art thinks - it's just more exposure of the art. But that's me and I'm a little bit weird. end.of.rant

There's also an excessive use of local color here and the shadows are just darker versions of the midtone and vice versa with the highlights. When the sun isn't there to color the shadows it's the stuff around the shadow that does, such as the atmosphere - that's why you'll be seeing way more blue shadows than you'll be seeing black shadows.
edit: you might also want to add an NSFW tag to the headline

tapeslinger

I think one of the problems with the lighting is that you're using sculptural lighting in a scene-- it doesn't really work right for that kind of setting. Sculptural lighting is where you put a highlight on all raised surfaces and a shadow on all recessed areas, which works great for reference sketches and "volume" drawings where the goal is to understand the space the object occupies outside of a context like background details.

I struggle with realistic lighting in my drawing and painting too, but this book by Burne Hogarth has been a really helpful guide to understanding ways to illustrate a scene in context of the light that is present in that scene. The colors should be affected by the light sources in the pictures, which should give you more muted and tertiary colors than just the primaries-- I think that's part of the color problem in most of these.

I like the mood and whimsy of the medicine man/fish hook/puppet guy, but he looks like a doll, his proportions are really twisted. The color palette there seems to be more tertiary and rich which is what seems to be drawing my eye into it.

squidbunny

Seconding tynic's thoughts on the puppet. It looks like a completely different artist; all the rest have the really blown-out white highlights and pillow shading. Puppet is working, though. :^:

Check out some of the coloring-focused tuts in QD&T, particularly this one. Pay special attention to the bits about hues and color identity.

earthwormadam

Not that there isn't a lot more problems going on with these, but the first thing that hits me is they are all reading super duper flat.

Like every one of these looks like there's a painted drop curtain hanging directly behind the characters, and they're getting their pictures taken for the barbarian yearbook.

Radar6590

Man, these people are ripping you apart in sort of a jabbing fashion, haha. I'll try to explain with words what specifically needs to be worked on.

I can more forgive the "generic" fantasy poses just because, well, I mean there's only so many. The challenge is to make it look good and make it your own. Other than that, despite all the critics I can at least see that effort was put forth. To me it looks like you're just inexperienced or uneducated about more realistic approaches to rendering and the "rules of light" and color.

The reason the doll image works so much better than all the others is because it is primarily neutral brown and also monochromatic. It has the same lighting issue that all of your other images have. It's all one color. But it works there because you have no other colors. Look at the button eyes. They have white highlights. Like the other images, too, it lacks any extreme contrast so it's very flat. Again, it works alright, but just in that image, and could definitely be improved.

To give a basic explanation of why every one is freaking out, you need to understand that light isn't just white and shadows aren't just black. Light is color, white light is all colors. The only time you'll ever really use white is in extreme situations, on shiny textures (and probably gray, like metal, and even then only a little), or in very direct sunlight. By contrast the shadows are usually the compliment of the light source's color. So if your light source is yellow/orange (fire, candlelight, most iridescent bulbs) your shadows will be purple/blue. Just very dark and without much vibrancy, so it's hard to notice.

Also don't use so much highlight. Try to define form and volume with shadows and midtones more than with light. Light reveals things to our eyes, lack of light gives them substance.

I admire the details in your images. With practice and time you'll learn how to represent them properly on a flat canvas. Keep at it.

Joshuaking

Thanks again for all the imput. I am still learning to play with color. Most of my work has been black and white, comic bookish stuff till a few years ago. Art in it's self is obviously very opinion based and I like to hear the good and bad from different views. Seems to be mostly negative on here though. Everyone will say something different about each individual peices I'm sure but I'm getting allot of comments on the color and shadowing which I agree with and will work on. Thanks again. Below are some of my background work Ive done. They might have some of the same issues but never the less let me know.

squidbunny

Upon close scrutiny that boat one does share some of the coloring issues with the fantasy figures (though it's mostly only on rounded surfaces -- and the nearest boat looks improperly constructed), but at a glance it looks great. I really like it either way.

Your environments seem a lot stronger structurally; I'm baffled why you've got such flat-looking backgrounds behind those characters when you can do work like this. The draftsmanship is great and the planes of value read generally well (though there's weird stuff happening with lighting as in the lights in the first one and the blocky-looking window highlights on some of the buildings).

Joshuaking

I think my biggest issue is time constraints. I dont have as much time to focas on background work as I like. The characters I can draw up in less than a half hour. The backgrounds take anywhwere from 3-6 hours. i work allot and most of my free time is spent working on my comic books.

earthwormadam

I guess that did seem kinda jabbing, but I didn't mean for it to sound like that. I mostly just started thinking about a barbarian/wizard school yearbook picture day and my mind kinda wandered away.

But yeah the newer ones still suffer from some of the color issues, but they're much less flat and display at least a bit of depth and perspective. I think the very last one is your strongest though. EDIT- Oh I thought I'd also mention on that dock piece, while the foreground has an interesting perspective and angle, once you peer into the background it looks like you feel back on your old ways and everything looks like its laid out very flatly and plainly. Keep trying to make things interesting and don't settle to just fill things in the first way you can think of. Try some new things.

I'd stop looking at things like, well the character took me this amount of time, and the background took me this long. Thats probably why the two are so jarring when viewed together. Don't look at the two elements so separately, work the image as a whole and I think you'll see that it will help eliminate the flat backdrop problem. If you find the backgrounds that time consuming for your character shots, why not just cut back on the details, while still trying to get some more interesting perspectives and dynamic environments.

Do you have more comic type work? You should post some of it as well if your looking for crits.

Joshuaking

Sure. I have two comics I work on. One is a bit Adult and Im not going to post it here. The other is about a group of kids to like to roleplay. The book goes into their story, turning them into the characters. Kind of an action comedy. I Have allot of geek freinds, me included who roleplay allot so it caught on pretty quick. Unfortunatly the quality isnt very good online though, whish could just download them from my computer.