Looking for Criticism and Companionship (first-time post)

wander

Hey everyone. This is my first time posting in the Artist's Corner (or on the entire forum, for that matter), but I'm hoping that I can become a part of this fantastic community.

Anyway, let's get right down to it! There's plenty of mediums that I love to work with, but I've recently been doing a lot of illustrations that I ink and scan for colouring on the computer. I don't have a definite style, so I'm trying all sorts of things out until something sticks. Here's some original work I made for a mini-portfolio (still haven't head back about that):

I'm also following up on this big project I'm doing where I wrote articles about my 31 favorite video games and I'm currently in the process of making a drawing to accompany the writing. Here are 3 of the more recent pieces of the project:

I'd say that they're all around 85% of being done (they could all use some touch-ups and the first two need a background), but they're to the point to where I feel like I can present them.

You can check out some of my other work here.

If anyone is feeling up for giving what I've got some constructive criticism, I'd love to hear it. Lay it on me!

NibCrom

I would work on getting smooth, confident lines. This will come with experience and practice. I would also look at doing some more traditional artwork using reference.

Your scans could be much cleaner. Your line work is more gray than black and there is evidence white around the inks. You can clean this up by adjusting the levels in Photoshop.

Think about where your pieces lead the viewer's eye. The weapons in your Samus piece and the last piece lead me right off the page.

There's really no excuse for having such large images, especially since you know they are so large. I can't even see the whole thing on a 1920px X 1080px monitor. If they don't work at a smaller size, they probably won't work at all.

Watch your color space. Many of those colors will never print with traditional CMYK techniques. Even if you never plan on having these printed, colors that obviously only work in RGB bother me. Maybe that's just a personal preference, but I think some others would feel the same way.

Your tv head piece is definitely your strongest work here. It looks like you used reference which helped a great deal. I like your goal of the 31 drawings. Goals keep you going. Keep on drawing. Practice, practice, practice. Developing a style comes with time. Let it develop naturally. It's all about how your interpret the things you see.

Good luck!

The_Glad_Hatter

Sorry mate, but your pictures are dead.
The easiest upload service for me was dropbox (just put the pics in a public folder on my pc and tadaaa)

wander

Okay, I've set up a dropbox account (very handy!) and have made the images a much more manageable size. I also edited the levels on a few of the images so that the lines were a little blacker. The application I use doesn't support CMYK currently, but I'm looking into fixing that problem.

Thanks for the tips, Nib!

NibCrom

I would still work in RGB mode even if CMYK is available. The thing is, even when you switch to CMYK mode, your screen doesn't actually switch. Computer monitors can only display RGB. My suggestion would be to work in RGB mode, and only switch to CMYK after you are done if you are going to print, then make adjustments as necessary.

If you are picking colors in Photoshop, the program will warn you when you get out of the CMYK range.

The_Glad_Hatter

I think you should still re-link the images in your orignal post.
If you go to the files in your dropbox folder, rightclick, and go to dropbox> copy public link, you can paste that link in here as an image link and voila.

wander

Whoops! I hadn't realized that they were private images. Should be fixed for good now.

Is there any way to replicate that colour warning in a program like gimp? I can get photoshop somehow if I need it.